I’m not too fond of the English title for Christian [...]

Michael Shannon doesn’t really look like Elvis Presley. For one thing, his face is shaped all wrong, his cheeks are too long and deeply creased. If it weren’t for the crazy haircut, the suits, and the sunglasses one would never think that Shannon was supposed to be The King. But then, neither does Kevin Spacey look like Present Richard Nixon. And yet through the sheer strength of their performances they completely inhabit these two men. Shannon

Richard Linklater is uniquely qualified to make a film like EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! By that, I mean he’s the fairly rare filmmaker who was a certifiable jock--both the quarterback and star pitcher for high school teams in Houston and Huntsville, Texas. A baseball scholarship helped pay for college. That perspective informs the athletes of his most famous film, DAZED AND CONFUSED (which, chances are, is probably playing on a cable

DEMOLITION is off from the first frame and never grounds itself enough to make a coherent argument. Hard to tell whether it’s Jake Gyllenhaal’s perplexed expression as he endeavors to show himself empty of emotions after the accidental death of his wife or the ill-thought storyline that appears to go in one direction and then unexplainably veers into another. Jean-Marc Vallée, who previously directed the excellent

On Monday night at the Alamo Drafthouse I caught a screening of GUN CRAZY, the influential low-budget 1949 B-movie starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall as a pair of bank-robbing lovers on the run. If you don’t know Dall, he was a Ben Affleck lookalike who starred in two minor classics in about eighteen months and then barely acted again—the other classic being Alfred Hitchcock’s ROPE. If you don’t know Hitchcock, then I really can’t help.

MARGUERITE ET JULIEN, which comes out this week, had everyone talking before its premiere at the 2015 Cannes Festival--the story deals with incest, after all, a taboo subject which should probably always remain taboo. Adapted from an original screenplay written by Jean Gruault for none other than French new wave master François Truffaut, MARGUERITE ET JULIEN stars French actors Jérémie Elkaïm and Anaïs

The story of Olympics legend Jesse Owens has always stuck with me. Not because of the glory of winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin games, setting records in front of Adolf Hitler. It has stuck with me because it haunts me – that a man could be a national hero one day and then struggle in the longer RACE of life. RACE doesn’t cover much of Owens’ life outside of his athletic peak. Being a pretty lame inspirational