Naomi Watts

Ultimately, Gyllenhaal’s ease with uneasy roles makes this bumpy ‘Demolition’ a somewhat satisfying deconstruction.

No amount of added action or plot twists can elevate ‘The Divergent Series: Allegiant’ beyond a glorified soap opera

One of the best, most fascinatingly perplexing films from a director who knows a thing or two about fascinating and perplexing films.

Though well-acted and capably directed, the heavy-handedness of Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young makes it one of his lesser efforts. Baumbach tries to anticipate the impending clash between Gen X bitterness and Millennial entitlement, but the execution feels uncomfortably Braff-ish. You’ll probably leave the theater smiling, but we’ve come to expect something a little more substantial from an observant filmmaker like Baumbach.

Noah Baumbach’s last few films have been about protagonists doing nothing, or at least trying to give the illusion of doing something. Ben Stiller’s Greenberg said as much, even while slowly building a doghouse for his brother. Greta Gerwig’s Frances Halloway was a professional dancer who didn’t dance to the point that it made her “undateable”. Baumbach’s latest film While We’re Young is about yet another form of stagnation: middle age. A married couple of forty-somethings encounter a married couple of twenty-somethings, and that illusion that they’re doing everything they’re meant to be doing at this age quickly fades away.

‘Insurgent’ has the emotional intensity of androids reciting an instruction manual. There’s nothing new to see here, and it’s delivered in the most listless fashion possible. Even for a sci-fi soap opera, Insurgent feels lazy and uninspired.

40. Empire Records Directed by: Allan Moyle Ah, the coming-of-age story. There was no sub-genre more hijacked for a quick buck in the 1990’s. In between the good ones (“Dazed and Confused,” “Boyz in the Hood”), the cheesy ones (“She’s All That,” “She Drives Me Crazy”), and the under-appreciated ones (“The Man in the Moon,” …

The 21st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards Nominations were revealed Wednesday morning, serving as yet another precursor on the long road to the Oscars. In the film categories, Birdman was the big winner, scoring four nominations, including for Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone, as well as the collective ensemble cast. Boyhood followed right …

While Jake Gyllenhaal blows up the internet with photographs of him with massive muscles for his next project, another one of the actor’s upcoming films has been sold with the director of Wild and Dallas Buyers Club set to bring it to the screen. Fox Searchlight announced on Wednesday that Jean-Marc Vallée’s followup to this …

The cast and crew, fly high in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by visionary Alejandro González Iñárritu. Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor who never bounced back from his peak stardom days as part of a 1990s superhero franchise, and who is desperate to gain back some spark for his faded career. Riggan attempts to jolt himself back into the limelight through the triple threat of writing, directing and starring in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

St. Vincent Written & Directed by Theodore Melfi USA, 2014   You know you have star power when an entire theater sits through the end credits just to watch you water a potted plant.  Such is our national obsession with Bill Murray.  Whether it’s a raised eyebrow or an awkward pause, you’re just waiting for …

His use of natural lighting, the gorgeous compositions he creates often on the fly, those long takes. This is what we talk about when we talk about Emmanuel Lubezki, the Mexican cinematographer responsible for such arresting imagery in the films of Terrence Malick (The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder), Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Y tu mamá también, Gravity), the Brothers Coen (Burn After Reading), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Anna”, a short in the anthology To Each His Own Cinema). He is the only cinematographer in recent memory, possibly next to Roger Deakins, that pushes the form to its limits and has name recognition for such. The naturalistic beauty of The Tree of Life was nothing compared to the – wait for it – physics-defying work in Gravity. And here he is again, using a simulated long take for Iñárritu’s Birdman. “But isn’t it just a gimmick?”, you might ask. Well, yes. And that’s probably the point.

At age 45, it feels like writer-director Noah Baumbach is getting soft. Best known for his caustic tragicomedies like Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and Margot at the Wedding, he took a turn in tone for his 2012 feature Frances Ha, which starred and was co-written by Greta Gerwig. So, though the warmth of that film might surprise someone familiar with his work, that it’s a collaboration with Gerwig explains at least part of that tone. While We’re Young, though, Baumbach’s newest film which premiered at TIFF this year and made a surprise appearance at the New York Film Festival, manages to carry that affection. It’s hard to top Frances Ha, but his newest is pleasant and impressive all the same.

Birdman is highly reminiscent of Noises Off, a play by Michael Frayn, about the insanity of actors as they weave in and out of doing scenes live in front of an audience on-stage. The unpredictable actor Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) throws Riggan Thomson’s life even more into chaos by his refusal to bend to his wishes. Emma Stone plays Sam, Riggan’s recovering addict daughter who has long been put on the back-burner by her dad. Stone and Norton’s challenging forces irritate but eventually bring Riggan face to face with some hard truths about himself.

Once again, Noah Baumbach’s taken to contemporary twenty-something culture. With Frances Ha he painted an apt portrait of a meandering young woman struggling to identify herself in a sea of expectation and pressure. Now, the gloves are off, as Baumbach zeroes in on the terrible and vaguely infectious character traits of the Me Generation. Narcissism and pretention are the order of the day, and we’re not talking about flippantly calling your ‘frenemy’ a narcissist: actual, clinical narcissism.

The struggle to maintain one’s personal sense of youth is at the heart of Adore, an Australian drama that wishes to be provocative without being particularly salacious or deep. Based on one of four short stories by Doris Lessing in the collection “The Grandmothers,” Adore feels very much like an adaptation of a story that’s too brief, a mere wisp that should be a gale force.

Before Zach Galifianakis gained mass popularity for being one third of the odd trio that comprised the core cast of The Hangover, he was known in the comedy community for his Between Two Ferns series, which sees Galifianakis interview actors, with the conversation not going the way these things tend to go. Now, with the Academy …

Movie anthologies have seen a rise in recent years, with several filmmakers collaborating on a series of short films, often with a common theme running through them, such as all being set in the same city, or all belonging to the same genre. The latest addition to this entry is Movie 43, which features a …

The Impossible Written by Sergio G. Sànchez Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona Spain, 2012 Based around the Boxing Day tsunami that struck South East Asia in 2004, The Impossible documents the true story of how one family of five was separated during the chaos, and their unlikely survival despite horrific injuries, presuming the other party …

The Impossible Directed by J.A Bayona Written by Sergio G. Sánchez Spain, 2012 It’s easy to be sceptical about ‘true story’ films. Too often, adaptations of real events contrive and exaggerate genuinely enthralling stories by turning them into blockbuster behemoths for cinematic effect. These films can lean heavily on the promise that the picture will …

The Impossible Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona Written by Sergio G. Sànchez Spain, 2012 It is a certainty that once every few years a film about a large scale disaster, natural or otherworldly, will be released in theatres. There is something about such terrifying events which strikes a particular nerve in people. Perhaps it is …

Clint Eastwood’s upcoming biopic J. Edgar written by Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, is shaping up to be a stellar movie with Eastwood directing and Leonardo DiCaprio on board as the infamous first director and founding member of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation: J. Edgar Hoover. Now comes word from Deadline that Josh Lucas (Poseidon, Sweet …

The rumor mill keeps churning on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. What is a Batman film without a love interest? Even better, what is a Batman film without a villain? Deadline claims that sources are telling them that Christopher Nolan will be meeting with six lovely ladies to fill in additional roles to the …