Major Theatrical
An adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel of the same name, On The Road follows the misadventures of Sal Paradise as he embarks on a cross-country bohemian odyssey with his wild muse Dean Moriarty. Escaping the soul-sucking doldrums of living with his Mother above a Queens, NY general store, Sal follows his friends first to Denver, Colorado and then beyond, all the while documenting the ups and downs of hitchhiking, shoplifting and bonding with the fellow travellers he meets along the way in his little notebook. This beautifully shot but ultimately directionless film benefits from two charismatic leads (Sam Riley...
Quartet is about the disruption that shakes up a retirement home for aging opera singers when a renowned diva, Jean, shows up with her bags. However, she is no stranger to the other residents. Jean, played by Dame Maggie Smith, has a history with many of the residents, all played by some of England’s heaviest hitters Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins, and Billy Connolly. As Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut, he really takes to behind the camera like an old pro. Hoffman doesn’t necessarily add anything new to the art form, but he employs tried and true methods flawlessly. He...
Director Andrés Muschietti delivers an unforgettable and terrifying debut feature with Mama. Sisters Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) go missing the same day their mother is murdered. Their Uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain) have spent five years searching for them, finally finding them in an abandoned cabin. The girls are almost completely feral, with only Victoria still able to speak. She talks about Mama, the person who helped them survive. Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash) believes that Mama is another personality that Victoria has created, but Annabel begins to think something evil has been...
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, recreates Osama Bin Laden’s ten-year manhunt. We watch CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) defy her superiors and give up sleep in her obsessive quest to pin down Bin Laden’s whereabouts. This mission involves espionage in Pakistan, satellite surveillance, phone tapping””and torture. Although we all know how this story ends, Zero Dark Thirty emphasizes the stress and and fear which haunted those involved in killing Osama Bin Laden. Keyword: stress. Like Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s last war film, Zero Dark Thirty engages viewers’ bodies as much as their eyes. Set mostly in Pakistan, the film...
Promised Land is a Little Guys vs The Corporation story. Steve Butler (Matt Damon), a natural gas salesman, tries to make good with the locals of a small town so that Global, his corporate employer, can drill the gas reserves out from underneath their feet. A seasoned pro, Butler expects to grease a few palms, pitch a few half-truths and move on to the next town. But a few obstacles come up. At a public hearing, an old science teacher calls Butler out on his company’s environmentally dangerous “˜fracking’ technique. Dustin Noble (John Krasinski), an unshakeable environmentalist, also threatens to...
Billy Crystal and Bette Midler play Artie and Diane Decker, two retirees (Artie’s just been fired from his baseball commentator job) who agree to look after their estranged grandchildren when their neurotic daughter Alice (Marisa Tomei) and her husband (Tom Everett Scott) are called away on a business trip. When they arrive at their daughter’s house, they’re dismayed to find that her parenting style is more of the hippy dippy “use your words” variety then of the “you’ll do what I say and like it!” method that they employed. Their grandkids have their own set of issues, from precocious to...
Django Unchained tells the story of Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter in the American south just before the Civil War. When he needs a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) to identify his latest marks, Schultz frees him. Proving incredibly useful in the bounty hunting business, Schultz offers Django a job assisting him. When Schultz discovers that Django’s wife was sold to a brutal slave owner (Leonardo DiCaprio), the two create a plan to get her back. Django Unchained is a nearly perfect Quentin Tarantino movie. Over time he has refined his signature over-the-top, raw, slick-talking style to...
Based on the true story of a Spanish family who were in Thailand when the tsunami hit on December 26th, 2004, The Impossible follows Henry (Ewan McGregor) and Maria (Naomi Watts) and their three children, Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin) in the aftermath of the disaster that ended up killing more than 280,000 people. When the wave hits, Maria and eldest child Lucas are separated from Henry and the two younger boys. As they all deal with being injured, frightened and completely disoriented, they attempt to find one another amongst the vast wreckage while also...
Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd) are both turning 40. They’ve been married for 14 years, have 2 daughters (Iris and Maude Apatow) and seemingly have their lives together yet…something still feels like it’s missing. Debbie owns a clothing shop that barely breaks even thanks to $12,000 that her top-selling salesgirl (Megan Fox) may have pilfered and Pete left his job at Sony Music to start his own record label that allows him to work with his musical heroes, but is in serious trouble because his heroes’ albums simply don’t sell. In the days leading up to Pete’s birthday...
Jack Reacher is a recurring protagonist in the crime thriller literature of Lee Child. The film Jack Reacher (an adaptation of Lee’s novel One Shot) is confusingly named after the brooding anti-hero, and stars Tom Cruise, who also produced. Reacher is a highly-decorated former military cop who is now a drifter/vigilante living off the grid. He’s the type of guy who does what’s right, whether it falls within the law or not. He’s incredibly clever, highly trained in combat, and always successful in whatever vigilante missions he undertakes. In the film, he’s caught in the investigation of a mass murder...
A musical film adapted from the stage musical adapted from the classic Victor Hugo novel, Les Misérables is story of Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), a man who’s been on the run from a ruthless police inspector named Javert (Russell Crowe) who is determined to make him pay dearly for breaking parole years before. One night by chance, Valjean comes across Fantine (Anne Hathaway), a desperate former employee of his who begs him to take custody of her young daughter Cosette (played as a teen by Amanda Seyfried). He agrees and raises Cosette as his own until she meets Marius (Eddie...
The Guilt Trip, starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen almost exclusively, is about a young man, Andy, trying to sell his cleaning product to department stores, and his lonely mother, Joyce. Before going on a cross country road trip, Andy stops at his mother’s home in New Jersey. Joyce reveals that she had a love affair with a man in her 20s, and has never stopped wondering about the guy. Unbeknownst to her, Andy tracks him down in San Francisco, and invites his mom to come on the road trip – under the guise that he wants to spend more...
