A light-hearted score by Jed Kurzel (“The Snowtown Murders”) punctuates Slow West, first-time director John Maclean’s 84-minute deconstruction of the myth of the frontier. Winner of the grand jury prize in the international dramatic competition at Sundance, the U.K.-New Zealand co-production is a slow burn that is awash in contradictions. Starring Michael Fassbender (“12 Years…
Frank is a man of many walls. He’s been building them for as long as he can remember, but it was only during his early teens that he actually got his first one made by his dad for a costume party that never was. Frank wears a big papier-mâché head over his mask — a…
The future is often grim when featured in sci-fi movies, but in the latest X-Men pic, X-Men: Days of Future Past, it’s the past that’s particularly depressing. Well, okay, it’s the future, too. For the seventh X-Men movie (as long as you count two lackluster Wolverine spin-off movies that clearly intended to be counted), Bryan…
With mutants on the edge of extinction due to their systematic elimination by the Sentinel program, long-time enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) realize the only way forward for their survival is to unite themselves in the past. The man to convince their younger selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, respectively) this…
One man’s harrowing journey through a personalized hell has been the focus of each of Steve McQueen’s three features, but never has the metaphor been so effectively explored by the filmmaker as it is in his deeply moving fact-based drama 12 Years a Slave. McQueen’s penchant for precisely pointed perspective is applied again here, but…
If ever you were looking for a movie where every day, conversational dialogue is turned into a form of deep, philosophical lecturing, then stop your search now, The Counselor is it. What you’ll also find is it’s a fresh, innovative, suspenseful film that, while suffering at times from a slow, disjointed tempo, has an intriguing…
If the title of X-Men: Days of Future Past didn’t confuse you, maybe the story line of the hotly anticipated movie will. Today, the war between mutants and humans is in full effect and the only way to change the current situation is to undo what was done. To that end, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is…
