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

It’s always the films about death which end up being [...]

It would have been so easy for Andreas Johnsen to [...]

In all seventy-six minutes of Benjamin Ree’s new documentary “Magnus” I’m not sure if I can remember ever seeing Magnus Carlsen, the world’s highest ranked chess player, ever smiling during a game. He smiles plenty when he wins, but that’s not the same. During the games his eyes scrunch up and his face tightens into a mask of marbled concentration. The happiest we ever see him is when he tears himself away from the obsession that

For a man who takes great pride in being a writer of crime fiction, architect Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson) sure acts like a blithering idiot when he get embroiled in an actual murder investigation. It’s quite astonishing, really; he doesn’t do one thing right. When his mentally unbalanced and suicidal wife winds up dead beneath a rural overpass—the same overpass where another high-profile murder victim was recently discovered—he

Director Gerardo Chijona liberally name-drops a plethora of Hollywood films in “The Human Thing”: “3:10 to Yuma” (1957), “The Godfather Part 2” (1974), “Terminator 2” (1991), and even 'The Sopranos.' One would expect that with such a macho pedigree of visceral violence “The Human Thing” would be some kind of high-octane thriller or cinematic homage. But it’s neither. The film is one of words and literature centered on

I remember those nights of iodine streetlights and black-suited riot [...]