A Chopped-Up Eleanor Rigby Suffers a Fate Worse than Loneliness

In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…

How Kevin Smith Got Young Again

#454887520 / gettyimages.comJustin Long, Kevin Smith, Haley Joel Osment and Genesis Rodriguez of Tusk pose for a portrait during the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.This summer, a prankster stole Kevin Smith’s Twitter account and tweeted, “Before this comes out I want to state that I am a gay proud man.”…

Zero Theorem Director Terry Gilliam Explains What Brazil Got Wrong

“I’ll always be anti-authoritarian, as long as I live,” says Terry Gilliam, the comic provocateur who’s been taking aim at the establishment for over four decades. The only thing that changes: his targets. In Life of Brian, it was religion. In Brazil, the government. And in his latest film, The…

Bill Hader Can Make You Cry in The Skeleton Twins

Four years ago, comedian Bill Hader told his agent he wanted to do a drama. It took awhile. “I used to think typecasting wasn’t a thing, and it totally is,” Hader admits. “That’s an industry feeling: ‘How can I take that person seriously when I know they’re capable of such…

Elvis Lives in The Identical — and so Does His Boring Twin

The Identical is Elvis slash fiction that could have been written by a spinster church organist. Its premise is intriguing: What if Jesse Presley, Elvis’ twin brother who was stillborn at birth, was in fact secretly given to a traveler minister (Ray Liotta) and his infertile wife (Ashley Judd)? What…

Gump Returns, Still with Nothing to Say

Forrest Gump has turned 20 and is celebrating its birthday with a week-long IMAX release. It’s a significant milestone for the six-time Academy Award winner. Today, 1994 is as far away from the present as the Vietnam War was from it. Forrest Gump was a fable without a moral, the…

Frank Exposes the Gulf Between the Brilliant and the Rest Of Us

Genius is hell, both for the blessed and those stuck in the shadows, cursed to spend a lifetime smashing their heads against the glass. In its presence we find ourselves dwarfed and dumb, like moths. We know we’re before brilliance we can’t comprehend — and we know we’ll never have…

Spare a Dame in Sin City

Sin City, population unknown but dropping every minute, is a gorgeous place, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Even the shadows and broken glass are beautiful in this black-and-white world. Only the women — all gorgeous — give the streets a pop of color. That is, only the women…

The Expendables 3 Refuses to Be Expendable or Especially Interesting

Titles don’t get more ironic than The Expendables 3. The franchise claims to be about death-seeking mercenaries yet stars ’80s action heroes, who refuse to die. Three films in, everyone in the sprawling team is still alive and ass kicking, save for Bruce Willis, whose million-dollar-a-day asking salary has caused…

Land Ho!‘s Horny Seniors Never Quite Charm

Land Ho! is a How Grandpa Got His Groove Back for the geezer set, a buddy road trip through Iceland, starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer-directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, respectively, young enough to be their leading men’s…

Brendan Gleeson Shines as an Irish Priest in Crisis in Calvary

In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy and the wind whips his cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is. Gleeson, an…

Anna Kendrick Had Her Heart Broken by a Hot Dog

“I forget that people think that I’m the girl with a ponytail and a briefcase,” says Anna Kendrick, perched on a couch in a T-shirt and jeans. Her career-launching role as a prim go-getter in Up in the Air is so far removed from her actual self that she’s still…

E.T. Update Earth to Echo Makes Everything a Device

Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that’s at once bland, well-intentioned and utterly terrifying about the mental development of modern children. As in the most honest kids films, our 5-foot heroes admit to being isolated, unhappy and cowed…

Paul Haggis’ Third Person Is a Baffling Rough-Draft Epic

If a toddler tried to re-create the mystifying behavior of adults, it would look a lot like Paul Haggis’ Third Person, a drama in which grown-ups scream and cry and kiss for reasons that are confounding even to those who understand speech. The film follows a handful of couples, or…

They Came Together Hilariously Wrecks the Rom-Com

Romances are Hollywood’s most anxiety-inducing fantasy. Like superhero flicks or horror films, they exist in a phony world of big scenes and breathtaking climaxes. But while audiences know that geeks can’t meld with spiders and that the bogeyman isn’t real, they still hope to fall in love, and boy, it’d…

Pattinson and Pearce battle through The Rover.

The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s follow-up to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a post-apocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world’s been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the events…