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Jim Broadbent, Helen Mirren “THE DUKE” My rating: B (In theaters) 95 minutes | MPAA rating: R For all of their perceived stuffiness, the British do love their eccentrics. And in Kempton Bunton — portrayed in Roger Michell’s funny/stirring “The Duke” by the great Jim Broadbent — they had one of the best. In 1961 Bunton,…

Hayley Bennett, Peter Dinklage The essential “Cyrano” story remains as seductive as ever, and the performances are spot on. Dinklage may have the greatest hangdog eyes in movie history, and he perfectly captures the character’s conflicting emotions (a cocksure cavalier when it comes to battle, a swooning romantic who is fearful of announcing his love)….

Macbeth (Denzel Washington), Thane of Glamis and Cawdor, a general in the King’s army, consults with Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) in “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s black-and-white re-telling of the Shakespeare play. I hate making these lists almost as much as I enjoy watching these films. Every year without fail, some wonderful film comes…

Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan “ THE TENDER BAR” My rating:  B (Amazon Prime) 106 minutes | MPAA rating: R Will the real Ben Affleck please stand up? I cannot think of another major actor — okay…Nicolas Cage — whose public persona ranges so widely between genius and ass-hat smirk monkey. One cannot dismiss successes like Affleck’s Oscar-winning…

December 23, 2021 by butlerscinemascene Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman   “LICORICE PIZZA” My rating: B (Theaters) 133 minutes | MPAA rating: R The name Paul Thomas Anderson on a movie (“Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood, “Boogie Nights,” “The Master”)  usually portends a good dose of  anger, angst and a journey through the underbelly of human experience. But…

December 23, 2021 by butlerscinemascene Simon Rex (and friend) “RED ROCKET” My rating: B (Theaters) 128 minutes | MPAA rating: R Filmmaker Sean Baker sure loves his losers. His debut feature, “Tangerine,” was a screwball comedy about a transsexual prostitute on Skid Row; his Oscar-nominated “The Florida Project” unfolded amongst the societal outcasts living in a shabby…

Om Amy Ryan Published March 22, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “LOST GIRLS” My rating: B (Now on Netflix) 95 minutes | MPAA rating: R Anger radiates from “Lost Girls” like steam from a boiling pot.  It swirls around us; we inhale it; we burn with it. Liz Garbus’ film is about…

Betty Gilpin (right) Published March 12, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “THE HUNT” My rating: C+ (Opens wide on March 13) 89 minutes | MPAA rating: R The premise of “The Hunt” —  a bunch of rich sphincters go hunting for other humans on a private game preserve — has been recycling through…

John Turturro   Published March 6, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “THE JESUS ROLLS” My rating: C+ (Opens March 6 at the Screenland Tapcade) 85 minutes | MPAA rating: R The lavender-loving, sexually ambiguous bowling fanatic Jesus Quintana appears for only five minutes in the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski.” But “the…

Steve Coogan Published March 5, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “GREED” My rating: C+  (Opens March 6 at the Glenwood Arts, Barrywoods 24 and Town  Center 20) 104 minutes | MPAA rating: R Steve Coogan has portrayed so many supercilious asshats that many of us — including some of my fellow film…

Barry Ward, Maeve Higgins Published March 5, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “EXTRA ORDINARY” My rating: B- (Opens March 6 at the Alamo Draft House and the Screenland Armour) 94 minutes | MPAA rating: R A supernatural comedy of exceeding drollness, “Extra Ordinary” feels like a mostly successful mashup of “The Frighteners,”…

Liam Neeson, Leslie Manville Published March 5, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “ORDINARY LOVE” My rating: B+ (Opens March 6 at the Rio) 92 minutes | MPAA rating: R In an era of caped escapism, an intimate cancer drama like “Ordinary Love” has about as much chance as a penguin in the shark…

Julia Garner Published February 20, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B+ (Opens Feb. 21 at the Town Center and Rio) 87 minutes | MPAA rating: R Just another day at the office becomes a moment of moral reckoning for the title character of “The Assistant,” a minimalist drama that only grows…

Published February 13, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: C  89 minutes | MPAA rating: R There’s a chill in the air of “Downhill,” and it’s only partly the result of five feet of perfect white powder. Set in an Austrian ski resort, the latest from directing duo Nat Faxon…

Issa Perica Published February 6, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “LES MISERABLES” My rating: B+ (Opens Feb. 7 at the Glenwood Arts) 104 minutes | MPAA rating: R From its first shot Ladj Ly’s Oscar-nominated (for best international feature) “Les Miserables” informs us that, no, this is not yet another remake of…

CLICK HERE to Watch the KCTV5 Review of “The Gentlemen” by Lonita Cook

Bradley Whitford, Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins Published January 16, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “THREE CHRISTS”  My rating: C- (Opens Jan. 17 at the Screenland Tapcade) 117 minutes | MPAA rating: R The title “Three Christs” suggests the possibility of blasphemy. If only. Jon Avnet’s film — shot in 2017 and on…

Guy Pearce Published January 15, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “DISTURBING THE PEACE” My rating: C- (Opens Jan. 17 at  the Screenland Tapcade) 90 minutes | MPAA rating: Apparently Aussie star Guy Pearce is the newest member of the don’t-send-the-script-send-the-check club. That’s the only explanation for his presence in the laughably inept “Disturbing…

Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx Published January 8, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “JUST MERCY”  My rating: C+ (Opens wide on Jan. 10) 136 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 In “Just Mercy” an A-list cast does its best with movie-of-the-week execution; the results are simultaneously inspiring and off-putting. Destin Daniel Cretton’s film…

Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, Eliza Scanlen Published December 24, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Christmas Day) 134 minutes | MPAA rating: PG Each generation, apparently, gets its own cinematic “Little Women.” Count Greta Gerwig’s new version among the best. Beautifully acted, classily mounted and…

Adam Sandler Published December 24, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: C+ (Opens wide on Christmas Day) 135  minutes | MPAA rating: R Funnyman Adam Sandler undergoes a remarkable transformation in  “Uncut Gems.”  He’s really, really effective as a Diamond District hustler whose debts and sins are rapidly closing in on…

Published December 20, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B+ (Now on Netflix) 125 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 At its best “The Two Popes” is a monumental acting duel that’ll leave viewers in open-mouthed amazement. The subjects of Fernando Meirelles’ witty and ultimately heart-tugging drama are the German Joseph Ratzinger…

Fox News founder Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) presides over a hostile work environment in Jay Roach’s Bombshell. by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | December 20, 2019 Cast: Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow, Allison Janney, Malcolm McDowell, Kate McKinnon, Connie Britton, Liv Hewson, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Rob Delaney, Mark Duplass, Stephen Root,…

Published December 19, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B+ (Opens Dec. 20 at the Glenwood Arts) 173 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 Spirituality is not something the movies do particularly well.  After all, it’s a visual medium; the inner workings of the heart are not easily captured by the camera….

The very curious Rum Tum Tugger (R&B singer Jason Derulo) in Tom Hooper’s heavily CGI-ed film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | December 20, 2019 Cast: Francesca Hayward, Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Mette Towley, Ray Winstone, Laurie Davidson,…

Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman Published December 19, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B (Opens wide on Dec. 20) 108 minutes | MPAA rating: R Simultaneously an insider’s look at Fox News, a record of the rise of Trump, and an examination of sexual harassment in the workplace, “Bombshell” can boast…

Taylor Swift  Published December 19, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating:  C+ (Opens wide on Dec. 20 ) 110  minutes | MPAA rating: PG It’s taken the musical “Cats” nearly 40 years to make its way from the stage to the big screen. Now we know why. Just as there are some…

Bethany (Jack Black) and Martha (Karen Gillan) inhabit video game avatars quite unlike their real-life selves in Jake Kasdan’s Jumanji: The Next Level. by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | December 13, 2019 Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Awkwafina, Ashley Scott, Danny DeVito, Alex Wolff, Danny Glover, Nick Jonas, Ser’Darius…

Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Paul Walter Hauser Published December 12, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B (Opens wide on Dec. 13) 129 minutes | MPAA rating: R Nearly 50 years ago the great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wondered (in a review of Sam Peckilnpah’s “Straw Dogs,” I recall) whether fascist…

Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne Published December 10, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B  (Now showing at the Glenwood Arts; on  Amazon Prime Dec. 20) 100 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 An aerial thriller packed with gobsmacking visual splendors, “The Aeronauts” is also historically based…though not so much as to let…

Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp) is an angry farmer who suspects that his animals, and way of life, have been poisoned by a multinational corporation in Dark Waters, the true story of a 20-year battle over a chemical compound used in the production of Teflon. by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | December 6, 2019…

Kelvin Harrison Jr., Alexa Demie Published December 5, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B+ (Opens Dec. 6 at the Screenland Armour, Barrywoods and Town Center) 135 minutes | MPAA rating: R “Waves” is about a suburban American family coming apart at the seams.  Featuring plot elements like teen pregnancy, substance abuse…

Scarlett Johanssen, Adam Driver Published December 5, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B+ (Premieres Dec. 6 on Netflix) 136 minutes | MPAA rating: R The opening moments of Noah Baumbach’s latest film finds a couple — Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) — rhapsodizing about the other’s best features….

Published December 3, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B 94 minutes | MPAA rating: R Fathers and sons have long been a staple of the dramatic arts; even so, “Honey Boy” stands apart as a brutal yet poetic bit of personal storytelling. Scripted by actor Shia LaBeouf, whose battles…

Daniel Kaluuya, Jodie Turner-Smith Mel Gibson, Sean Penn Published December 2, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B (Now showing) 131 minutes | MPAA rating: R “Bonnie and Clyde” (or perhaps “Thelma and Louise”) meet Black Lives Matter in “Queen and Slim,” the impressive feature film directing debut of television and…

Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) is a lawyer who becomes a folk hero in Melina Matsoukas’ lovers-on-the-run story Queen & Slim. by DAN LYBARGER SPECIAL TO ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE | November 29, 2019  Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Jodie Turner-Smith, Bokeem Woodbine, Benito Martinez, Chloë Sevigny, Flea, Sturgill Simpson | Director: Melina Matsoukas | Rating: R for violence, some strong sexuality,…

Daniel Craig…Southern fried private eye My rating: B (Opens wide on Nov. 27) | 130 minutes | MPAA rating: Published November 26, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene The genteel drawing-room murder mystery gets roughed up but emerges more or less intact in “Knives Out,” the latest from “it” director Rian Johnson…

Mister Rogers (Tom Hanks) meets journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) in TriStar Pictures’ A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.   Published November 22, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Nov. 22) | 108 minutes | MPAA rating: PG Movie trailers are a hugely effective way of…

Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller My rating: C (Opens wide on Nov. 22) | 99 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published November 21, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene To the extent that it delivers a series of adrenaline-stoked action sequences and a ridiculously high body count, Brian Kirk’s “21 Bridges” should satisfy audiences…

Published November 18, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “JOJO RABBIT” My rating: C+r (Now showing) | 118 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 “Jojo Rabbit” is one of those movies more satisfying in principle than in practice. The latest from Kiwi auteur Taika Waititi (“What We Do in the Shadows,” “Hunt for the…

Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa; Robert DeNiro as Frank Sheeran Published November 16, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B (Now at the Alamo Drafthouse, Screenland Armour and Standees) | 209 minutes | MPAA rating: R Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated “The Irishman” is a good movie. Not a great one. It’s…

Air Machinist Mate Third Class Bruno Gaido (Nick Jonas) was a real-life war hero, though the derring-do he’s depicted as performing in Roland Emmerich’s Midway actually happened months before that battle.  Cast: Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Luke Evans, Woody Harrelson, Mandy Moore, Dennis Quaid, Alexander Ludwig, Aaron Eckhart, Darren Criss, Nick Jonas, Jake Weber, Tadanobu…

Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson Published November 3, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene My rating: B | 109 minutes | MPAA rating: R With Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” we don’t so much watch a couple of men go crazy as experience that craziness with them. The film has been beautifully photographed, but beware…it is disconcerting,…

Cast: Emilia Clarke, Henry Golding, Emma Thompson, Michelle Yeoh, Lydia Leonard, Boris Iskovic, Peter Mygind, Rob Delaney, Laura Evelyn, Ingrid Oliver | Director: Paul Feig | Rating: PG-13, for language and sexual content | Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes by DAN LYBARGER SPECIAL TO ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE | November 8, 2019 at 1:47 a.m. Coming out more…

Roy Cohn “WHERE’S MY ROY COHN?”  My rating: B | 97 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 Published November 2, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Disbarred attorney and right wing political fixer Roy Cohn was such a creepy  character (those sociopathic hooded eyes) that liberals may be forgiven for wanting to forget…

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Edward Norton   My rating: C+ (Opens wide on Nov. 1) | 144 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published October 31, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene It’s easy enough to understand why an actor of Edward Norton’s capabilities — or even an actor of lesser capabilities — would jump at…

Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones) are idealistic activists trying to stop a ruthless land developer — based on the real-life New York figure Robert Moses, who at one point held 12 public offices simultaneously despite never winning an election — from dominating the city in Motherless Brooklyn. Cast: Edward Norton, Bruce…

by DAN LYBARGER  | October 26, 2019 Originally Published at: https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=32939&reviewer=382 As he matures, producer-director Deon Taylor is slowly learning that storytelling can be a lot more suspenseful than borrowing jump scares from other movies. In his previous thriller The Intruder, Taylor practically broadcast the dangers to come so it wasn’t shocking that Dennis Quaid wasn’t…

Eddy Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore“DOLEMITE IS MY NAME” My rating: B- (Debuts Oct. 25 on Netflix) 118 minutes | MPAA rating: R My rating: B- (Debuts Oct. 25 on Netflix) |118 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published October 24, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Aside from setting a cinema record for the number…

Mistress of Evil Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) would rather not engage with puny humans but suffers them for her goddaughter’s sake in Disney’s latest live-action fairy tale. by DAN LYBARGER SPECIAL TO DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE | October 18, 2019 at 1:47 a.m. Director: Joachim Ronning | Rating: PG, for intense sequences of fantasy action/ violence and brief scary…

by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | October 18, 2019 at 1:46 a.m. Memphis-based filmmaker Craig Brewer’s new Netflix film Dolemite Is My Name may be a bio-pic about Fort Smith-born comedian Rudy Ray Moore, but, in many ways, the director is making a movie about himself. Moore, played in Brewer’s film by Eddie Murphy,…

Toni Servillo as Silvio Berlusconi “LORO” My rating: B (Opens Oct. 11 at the Screenland Armour)  151 minutes | No MPAA rating Published October 10, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Italian politico Silvio Berlusconi, the subject of Paolo Sorrentino’s hallucinatory “Loro,” is described by one of his cronies as the world’s greatest…

Maika Monroe, Bill Skarsgard My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 11 at the Screenland Armour)  88 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published October 10, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene The ironically titled “Villains” makes audiences  root for a pair of truly stupid criminal lovers by providing antagonists who are infinitely worse. In Dan…

If there is one theme that emerges from this year’s Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, it’s that all of the movies reveal hidden joys or hidden consequences of seemingly familiar subjects. For example, the opening night film Flannery not only recounts Flannery O’Connor’s influential stories, but it also probes how her Catholicism and her health problems influenced…

Young Joey (Lewin Lloyd) and Lorna Luft (Bella Ramsey) live a peripatetic existence with their mother, Judy Garland (Renée Zellweger) in Rupert Goold’s biopic Judy. Director: Rupert Goold    Rating: PG-13, for substance abuse, thematic content, some strong language, and smoking Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette |…

My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Oct. 4)   121 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published October 2, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene If Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier teamed up to make a superhero movie, the result would be just like “Joker.” Less conventional comic book material than existential scream, Todd…

My rating: B+ (Opens Sept. 27 at the Screenland Tapcade) 93 minutes | No MPAA rating Published September 26, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene I knew who Anton Yeltsin was, of course.  I’d seen the young actor as Chekhov in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboots, and in a couple of other movies like…

Rene Zellweger as Judy Garland My rating: B (Opens wide on Sept. 27) 118 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 Published September 26, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene One of the biggest thrills in moviegoing is seeing a familiar performer sink so completely into a character that you forget who  you’re watching. That’s the case…

Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets tells the true story of British whistleblower Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), who found herself facing a possible prison term after she leaked the contents of a scandalous U.S. memo. Ralph Fiennes (left) plays her barrister in the film. by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | September 27, 2019 It’s tempting…

Everest, a displaced yeti, is befriended by the young Yi (voice of Chloe Bennet) who tries to help the creature return to his Himalayan home in Abominable. by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | September 27, 2019 Director: Jill Culton, Todd Wilderman – Rating: PG, for some action and mild rude humor – Running…

Peter Sarsgaard My rating: C+ (Opens Sept. 27 at the Screenland Tapcade) 87 minutes | MPAA rating: Published September 26, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Before it goes off the philosophical rails and disappears up its own nether regions, “The Sound of Silence” casts an eerie spell. Our protagonist is acoustic specialist Peter…

Daniel Scheitert, Andre Hyland, Michael Abbott Jr. My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 27 at the Alamo Draft House) 100 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published September 26, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Given that the combined IQs of the characters in “The Death of Dick Long” is about 45, it’s remarkable that Daniel…

My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 27 at the Barrywoods 24)  98 minutes | No MPAA rating Published September 26, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene A family comedy with just enough edge, “Before You Know It” is the creation of Hannah Pearl Utt and Jen Tullock, who co-wrote the script and star as mutually…

My rating: B+  122 minutes | MPAA rating: PG Published September 24, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Feature film spinoffs of successful TV series have an iffy track record (“Sex and the City,” “Entourage,” “Absolutely Fabulous”), but the folks at “Downton Abbey” have done it right. The new “Downton Abbey” movie…

The emotionally devastated Maj. Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is sent into space on a mission that ultimately involves him confronting the father he long thought dead in James Gray’s Ad Astra. by DAN LYBARGER Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | September 20, 2019 Rating: PG-13, for some violence and bloody images, and for brief strong…

by DAN LYBAGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | September 20, 2019 Rating: R, for violence and disturbing images, drug use, strong sexual content, and language, Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Despite featuring gunplay, nudity, illicit drugs and a setting that crosses two continents, Running With the Devil feels more like a leisurely, chemically enhanced stroll. Writer-director…

My rating: C+ (Opens wide on Sept. 13) – 109 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published September 12, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene “Hustlers” arrives on a wave of fest-generated hype: It’s one of the year’s best!!!  Jennifer Lopez is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination!!! Uh, sorry, but I don’t see it. Writer/director…

My rating: B- (Opens wide on Sept. 13) – 111 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published September 12, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene There are moments when “Official Secrets” doesn’t seem to know just whose story it is telling; others when the dialogue sounds more like speechifying than regular conversation. Still, there’s something so…

My rating: B (Opens Sept. 13 at the Studio 28) – 92 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13 Published September 12, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Since it debuted on Broadway in 1964, not a day has passed when “Fiddler on the Roof” was not being performed somewhere on Earth. The universal appeal of this…

“DAVID CROSBY: REMEMBER MY NAME” My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 6 at the Glenwood Arts) 95 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published September 5, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene As a founder of the Byrds and a long-standing member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,  David Crosby can claim to be rock ‘n’…

“TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID” My rating: B (Opens Sept. 6 at the Screenland Armour) 83 minutes | No MPAA rating  Published September 5, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene Combining the grittiness of Luis Bunuel’s 1950 landmark “Los Olivdados” with the psychological fantasy pioneered in recent years by Guillermo del Toro, “Tigers Are…

“BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON” My rating: B (Opens Sept. 6 at the Glenwood Arts) 113 minutes | MPAA rating: R Published September 5, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene The title character of “Brittany Runs a Marathon” does indeed participate in the famous 26.2-mile run through New York’s five boroughs…but Paul Downs Colaizzo’s film isn’t…

by DAN LYBAGER Special to the Democrat-Gazette | August 30 at 1:46 a.m. Baykali Ganambarr has been working to preserve the culture of Yolngu aborigines from the Northwest Territory in Australia. By himself and as a member of Djuki Mala dance troupe, he applies traditional moves to a hip hop beat, films the performance and…

    Reality is an ill fit for Steven Spielberg. The man is an adolescent boy at heart, perfectly suited to Ready Player One’s future where virtual reality has triumphed over the real thing. During the breathlessly expository opening, as teenage hero Wade Watts narrates a tour of an online simulation called the Oasis, one…

At last, there’s a sense of urgency in a Blade Runner movie. (That title, borrowed from Burroughs, evokes so much movement that grafting it onto Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie always felt like a bad joke.) The newest model, Blade Runner 2049, may not possess the fleet outline—four replicants, four set pieces—of the original or its…

In May 1973, Bobby Riggs challenged Margaret Court to a tennis match. Riggs was 55 and had been retired for 22 years. Margaret Court was 30 and the number-one ranked female player in the world. Riggs smashed Court, beating her 6-2 in game one and 6-1 in game 2. It was the height of the…

Director Kathryn Bigelow long ago abandoned the biker vampires and surfer cops that propelled her early work. She makes big, important movies now that start big, important conversations. The loudest so far was about Zero Dark Thirty and its alleged suggestion that “enhanced interrogation” provided key information in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. I don’t have…

A Ghost Story is so spare that its main characters don’t even have names. (The credits list Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as C and M, respectively.) Outwardly a love story, it’s phenomenally sincere stuff. And while the image of Affleck haunting his old stomping ground through a white sheet and two eyeholes is easily…

Christopher Nolan is fascinated by mechanical precision—his movies radiate with the same formal fastidiousness and emotional remove that guided Kubrick. But he’s chillier than Kubrick; Nolan doesn’t make movies so much as he builds contraptions. And, as if he was unsure of his command of craft, Nolan demonstrates an uneasy reliance on razzle-dazzle chicanery over…

The poster for The Beguiled radiates with the visages of its three stars: Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning. Kidman, who channels Deborah Kerr here as much as she did in The Others and who looks as if she hasn’t aged a day in the 16 years since that movie’s release, plays Martha Farnsworth…

Wonder Woman (a.k.a. Diana Prince) emerged in the lull between the 19th Ammendment and the sexual revolution. In the character’s embrace of sexuality, femininity, and agency, she’s almost like a vision from the future: a proto-third-waver who never suffered the indignities of the postwar era. That kind of liberated earnestness drives Wonder Woman’s perversely old-fashioned…

Those of us who adore the 1979 movie Alien do so because we “admire its purity.” That line is spoken by undercover android Ash when he encounters the extraterrestrial specimen—he’s a sucker for efficiency—but it applies equally to the movie’s conceptual backbone. Alien combined creaky haunted house tropes and a slasher-movie literalism with a working-class view…

Kong, giant ape and eighth wonder of the world, might as well be a stand-in for the whole enterprise known as blockbuster filmmaking. He’s a six-foot gorilla blown up to gigantic proportions; for Kong, the life-sized is spectacle. And on the practical end, he seems to pop up onscreen around forward leaps in special effects….

Horror movies are the medium’s most express conduit into our collective anxieties. Nuclear annihilation, creeping Soviet subversion, and anti-communist hysteria loomed over Eisenhower-era cinema; race and Vietnam flow through Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and the resurgent conservativism of the Reagan years spawned a slew of teenage slasher flicks. Even…

In silent, extreme close-up, we see a face. The expression is rapt, the makeup-caked eyes wide and unblinking. Light flickers, bouncing off her visage in rapid fire, and we get the sense that she’s surrounded by darkness. Just when we’re oriented—this must be a movie theater—the light abruptly switches to blue long enough for us…

The whole reboot craze could, arguably, be traced back to a movie that wasn’t even a reboot. Pirates of the Caribbean took a familiar piece of intellectual property and built a juggernaut blockbuster out of its spare parts. And like all fads, there’s always something to the original that explains the allure. Sure, Pirates (and,…

  After three decades, Pedro Almodóvar remains among contemporary cinema’s key iconoclasts. A flamboyant stylist bursting with outsized empathy, he ushered the international queer movement into the mainstream with proudly gaudy excess, refining his trademark fixation on women over a career unlike any other. While stateside contemporaries like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant lead with…

M. Night Shyamalan has always been a better entertainer than artist. Despite an almost preternatural sense of staging and framing, he’s a showman at heart. Whatever he lacks in self-awareness, he makes up in self-seriousness and ego. Maybe that’s why his latest, “Split,” simultaneously looks like a return to form and an indication that this…

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that after Jacques Demy turned in his first draft of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, its producers had three notes: make it in black and white, change the title, and cut the songs. They were wrong, of course, but it speaks to the movie’s power that it would’ve worked anyway; beneath…

  The new Star Wars movie is dark, both figuratively and literally. Positioned by director Gareth Edwards as a corrective to The Force Awakens, the most expensive reunion special of all time, it eschews that movie’s giddy cynicism and big names in favor of obsessive, miscalculated seriousness. It belongs somewhere on the autism spectrum. Set…

Against the opening credits, nude women joyfully gyrate in slow motion. Their obese bodies surge and swell with the weight of ocean waves. One twirls a baton, others shake pompoms or hoist sparklers. Each is on her own stage, flanked by crimson-red curtains while patrons roam the gallery. Is it art or empty provocation? Susan…

  Kenneth Lonergan has made three movies in his 16-year-old career, all effortlessly profound. His first, You Can Count on Me, was a tiny masterpiece about two grown siblings who’ve grown apart and meet decades after their parents’ premature death. His second, Margaret, was about a young woman testing the kind of person she wants…

The Love Witch is a fireworks display of movie ecstasy. As self-consciously retro as all of Tarantino, it’s stuck out of time. Any single frame might suggest an especially lavish-but-forgotten collaboration between C-grade horror maestros Roger Corman and Mario Bava, with a behind-the-scenes assist from sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman. (Its soundtrack, again besting Tarantino, is…

  Attempting to explain the fascination “movie people” have with Howard Hughes, David Thomson puts it best: “the daft wealth, the amazing fame, and the yearning to be nothing; the obsession with flying; the taste for hotels, Las Vegas, and bloodless food delivered in plastic bags—this is the little boy’s kingdom; the foolish resort to…

  1942. Occupied Casablanca. Champagne corks pop as a big band swings. A nightclub whirs with cigarette girls, refugees, burnouts, Nazi officers, Resistance fighters, and Vichy troops. A pair of well-dressed spies walks in. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world… Well, you know the rest. Sort of. For…

Jeff Nichols isn’t even 40, but in the past decade, he’s announced himself as one of our country’s most vital moviemakers. His grasp of quotidian Midwestern detail is unparalleled; he captures the red-state landscapes of Wal-mart Superstores and Ford pickups like no one else in contemporary Hollywood. Early works like Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter…

Denis Villeneuve’s grip is so tight, his touch so icy, that I wouldn’t blame captive audiences for feeling short on oxygen. His movies are as chilly as their icepick titles (Incendies, Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario). Cold without being cerebral, quick without necessarily being fun, gorgeous without being pretty, his movies feel as alive and human as…

Although Doctor Strange’s aesthetic cues run the cinematic gamut—mid-century sci-fi, grimy kung fu, Japanese New Wave horror—its blend of psychedelic, M.C. Escher-inspired optical illusion is most directly indebted to Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan. That’s an especially icy pair, and those two only barely got away with their respective gambits. 2001 earned its bursting, psychedelic…

A distinct blend of cornball sincerity and perverse ultra-violence, Hacksaw Ridge is the kind of thing that could only come from the mind of Mel Gibson. He’s a man out of time: inspired, square, and completely out of his mind. In form and content, movies like Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ manage to…

Tehran, mid-1980s. In a rickety office, a man wearing a rumpled suit and the pursed face of a bureaucrat takes notes. He’s flanked by a photograph of Ayatollah Khomeini on one side and the tremendous expanse of Tehran’s skyline on the other. He barely looks up as a chador-wrapped woman named Shideh begs to return…

Now recognized one of the best filmmakers to emerge from the Hollywood studio system, Alfred Hitchcock was largely dismissed by the critical establishment during his most fruitful period. Even after the radical critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave suggested there was more to Hitchcock than his gimmicky marketing-genius persona, two decades passed before he was…

Discussing Nate Parker’s fall from grace touches so many hot-button issues that juggling a live grenade appears a more innocuous proposition. But separating art from its artist is a key component in the pact we make when approaching any text. It’s at the heart of the intentional fallacy, the suggestion that criticism shouldn’t resemble psychoanalysis….

Found-footage movies are inherently impossible. The conceit—that we’re watching newly unearthed, raw recordings of extraordinary events—betrays itself with every single cut. (Who’s editing this stuff?) Film is a medium built on our brains’ reaction to seeing two images edited together, and a movie that loses credibility with every edit faces a steep curve. The makers…

Of every conceivable genre, none is more nebulous and straightforward than the thriller; it simply has to elicit excitement. And while every description of Deepwater Horizon I’ve read classifies the movie as such, I’m not sure excitement is the emotion it evokes. Or more accurately, I’m not sure I want to admit to being excited….

John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven occupies a unique space within the international back-and-forth of moviemaking. Although the 1960 version walks and talks like the kind of classically rousing, Cinemascope epics that MGM cranked out in the Eisenhower era, it was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai—itself deeply indebted to Hollywood Westerns. A year after…

Blair Witch is a jump-scare machine. Built for maximum efficiency, it cranks out shocks with spooky precision. Wisely dispensing with any pretense to fan service—the franchise’s villain was always lame—director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett use every trick in the book to pound their audience into submission. It’s an exhausting experience. And it’s also…

Ads for Sully promise an “untold story”—a stranger-than-fiction reveal. And its opening sequence delivers something like that. Within minutes, a passenger jet careens through Midtown Manhattan. It’s at a perilously low altitude before it drops out of the sky altogether and plows into a high-rise. Just as the airliner detonates in an eruption of mortar…

Writer and director Derek Cianfrance blindsided audiences in 2010 when he released Blue Valentine. Announcing himself as a kind of sentimental hipster heir to John Cassavettes, Cianfrance concocted an emotionally raw and sexually frank experience that managed to find something like beauty in hopelessness. His follow up, The Place Beyond the Pines, was very much…

Gus Van Sant’s career is one of the most unpredictable in contemporary Hollywood. He arrived from the Pacific Northwest just as “independent movie” became an unlikely genre of its own. Along with Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino, he was at the forefront of a sort of return-to-roots movement that rejected the formula and excess that…

The politics of working-class populism are thorny. On one hand, the American dream is careening out of reach. On the other, the cycle of poverty that inflicts so many urban communities seems just as unstoppable. It’s a nuanced issue that deserves immediate attention and careful consideration. With its inner-city Detroit setting and depiction of unending…

With his swaggering, heel-popping stride and combustible intensity, Édgar Ramírez is one of the most interesting actors working today. He has an oily handsomeness that can switch from charming to dangerous at a moment’s notice. And as a terrorist-for-hire in Carlos—his best role so far—he demonstrated his Method chops with an eagerness to transform his…

Frank Zappa was, if nothing else, an iconoclast who blurred the lines between high and low, pop and the underground. He was spiky interviewee and an outsized personality every bit as attention-grabbing as his art. Is there another person whom Paul McCartney, Jeff Buckley, and Pere Ubu all cite as an influence? Maybe Bob Dylan….

While prequels are nothing new—non-linear narratives date back to Homer—the origin story is a relatively recent development, and its increasing dominance as a storytelling device speaks to the overwhelming influence of comic books on movies. Origin stories spring from superhero mythology; thanks to the flood of ever-changing continuity inherent in serialization, comic books inevitably return…

Hell or High Water shoots out of the gate and doesn’t ease up until the credits roll. In a single take, we follow a bank teller as she arrives for work, pulls into the empty parking lot, and fishes for her keys while two gunmen in ski masks lurk at the edge of the frame….

Philip Roth’s novels have been notoriously difficult to adapt to the big screen. And that’s not just because his work brims with sexual behavior that’s startling even in an age when stuff like Fifty Shades of Grey is considered blockbuster entertainment; despite his confessional style, his prose is steely stuff. It’s deeply literary, dense, and…

The Bourne Identity launched an entirely new kind of spy movie when it was released in June, 2002. It was sharp, serious, and critical of counterintelligence agencies without ever appearing outright subversive. Next to the Bond series—responsible for Die Another Day that same summer—Bourne seemed like a true 21st century superspy: stoic, solitary, and maybe a…

Café Society is, by my count, Woody Allen’s forty-sixth feature film. Allen is 80 years old, and his career is unprecedented in contemporary Hollywood moviemaking—he’s a true auteur, unmatched in sheer volume of movies that are distinctly his own. And with Café Society, he’s made the ultimate Woody Allen movie. Café Society has the tone…

Toward the end of Star Trek Beyond’s first act, the crew of the Enterprise docks at the colony Yorktown. It’s a spectacular place, straight out of M.C. Escher’s wildest imagination. Bridges of skyways and skylines twist and spin around each other in stationary orbit while ships pass through watery tunnels suspended in midair. As the…

Last week, the Internet combusted when John Cho revealed that Hikaru Sulu would have a husband in Star Trek Beyond. Almost immediately, George Takei announced his opposition to the reconfigured sexuality of the character he originated in 1966: he played the character as straight, and the reversal implies that his Sulu would now read as…

When Ghostbusters was released in 1984, Pauline Kael wondered why audiences were falling for it. Too rigid and overproduced for an anarchic comedy but too shaggy and shapeless for a blockbuster, it was big but not very funny. Still, it was a smash, and Kael pinpointed a reason audiences might’ve been eating it up: the…

A deeply gifted technician, Steven Spielberg is a source of almost bottomless cinematic ingenuity. Whether it’s a marvel camera move or a perfectly balanced frame, his movies overflow with easy innovation, and audiences never forget they’re in the hands of someone with a near-otherworldly command of technique. His movies are almost inhuman in their calculated…

Fittingly, De Palma opens with its subject gushing about Alfred Hitchcock and, in particular, Vertigo. “What’s so compelling about it is that he’s making a movie about what a director does, which is basically to create these romantic illusions. He makes you fall in love with it and then he kills it. Twice. And it’s…

Within moments of its start, it’s clear that there’s some kind of sorcery at work in Swiss Army Man. It arrives riding a wave of buzz and a singular hook. That a movie so bizarre—and seemingly without anything resembling restraint or self-awareness—even exists is a feat in itself.  And for a few glorious hours, Swiss…

Despite overwhelming evidence for the effectiveness of firearm bans similar to those in place across Europe and Australia, there’s a reason we’ll never see such legislation stateside: freedom and guns are as American as baseball and apple pie. Even a cursory glance at our bloody 250-year history reveals the singular role guns have played in…

How do you talk about a movie like Warcraft? For the uninitiated, Warcraft is a series of medieval-fantasty computer games—part Tolkien, part Dungeons and Dragons, all nerdy—that helped ushered in the modern era of acronym-heavy gaming. Although it began life as an RTS (real-time strategy), it became part of the lexicon with the release of…

Just over fifteen years ago, Bryan Singer released his movie adaptation of X-Men and changed the course of superhero movies for a generation. That movie dared to take its spandex-clad mutants and their conflict seriously by replacing their Day-Glo uniforms for black-leather jumpsuits and injecting the CGI mayhem with a touch of metaphor. What if,…

There isn’t much blood in blockbusters these days. That’s both figurative and literal: if Captain America falls from a high rise, rest assured he’ll walk it off without needing a Band Aid—much less a transfusion. When Mad Max: Fury Road exploded across screens last summer, few noticed its lack of the red stuff. Even fewer…

As justice-leagued avengers have seized the cultural landscape, entertainment options have narrowed tremendously. With Captain America: Civil War, Marvel launches Phase Three of its operation to reclaim the mono-culture, but it can’t escape the creeping sense that something is rotten in the state of the art. Six short weeks after releasing D.C.’s toxically dour dust-up Batman v…

Coasting on fumes and drained by the road, a hardcore-punk band is on the verge of calling it quits. After a meager show and an even less successful interview, they’re ready to pack it up and call it tour. And one guesses that, when they return home, the experience has left them so embittered that…

As an extended riff on action-movie tropes by a pair of sketch-comedy vets, Keanu’s most obvious point of reference is Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz. Like that movie, Keanu plays it mostly straight: there’s no outright absurdity or slapstick farce. Instead, it’s an honest-to-goodness action movie, with the subplots replaced by what’re essentially half-baked bits of sketch…

The Invitation is as tightly wound and volatile as an IED. It lulls viewers with a Molotov cocktail of fine wine, a hint of overdue reconciliation, and a healthy dose of festering paranoia. It’s bound to burst at any minute—No Exit by way of Taxi Driver. The setup is mannered in the best way. A…

Set to the propulsive beat of “My Sharona,” Everybody Wants Some!! opens with its hero on the road, car packed with essentials: notably turntable and record collection. It’s 1980, and he’s en route to his freshman year of college on a baseball scholarship. In three days (and counting), class will begin. But before then, Jake…

About a third of the way through Disney’s remake of The Jungle Book, an enormous python with the narcotically sexy voice of Scarlett Johansson appears out of the rainforest fog. She coils around pre-adolescent runaway Mowgli and describes his singularly destructive potential. He’s the lone human in a jungle populated by what’re basically alien creatures,…

  Jake Gyllenhaal exudes a kind of toothy vacuousness that, in the right hands, could be volatile magic. His matinee-idol looks and shark-like grin suggest a devilishly vacant Jack Nicolson or Anthony Perkins on amphetamines. But that potential has gone untapped: Nightcrawler amplified his vacancy at the expense of impish dazzle; Zodiac made him a…

Midnight Special, which expands to Kansas City theaters this weekend, moves like a bullet train. It’s at full speed out of the gate: a newscast announces an Amber Alert, and Roy (Michael Shannon, a reservoir of brutish empathy) is the subject of a statewide manhunt for kidnapping 10-year-old Alton. Roy has a partner who appears…

Pitched somewhere between The Manchurian Candidate and Memento, Atom Egoyan’s Remember is sensational entertainment. More electric than any octogenarian Holocaust thriller has any right to be, it has the wicked, trashy appeal of Brian De Palma at his best, swapping that director’s lurid morality for equally dubious ethics. To frame genocide through the lens of…

I’m far from a qualified psychologist, but I doubt the experts would disagree: Robert De Niro exhibits acute workaholic tendencies. He worked steadily in Hollywood for over two decades when, in the mid-1990s, he became an entrepreneur. He made strides in the restaurant business, real estate, and hotels. Before long, he’d established his beloved Manhattan…