Caché
Creepy drama about an upper-middle-class couple (played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) who start receiving, on their doorstep, mysterious videotapes taken of their home. (Shades of David Lynch's Lost Highway, only without the surrealism.) While innocuous enough in and of themselves, the tapes convince the couple that they are being stalked. Moreover, the tapes are often accompanied by crude… read more!
Cairo Time
Patricia Clarkson plays Juliette, a New York magazine editor who arrives in Cairo in order to enjoy a much-needed vacation with her husband, a UN employee overseeing a refugee camp in Gaza. When hubby is delayed for several days because of work, a bored Juliette finds company in the only person she knows in the city: her husband's former colleague… read more!
Calendar Girls
Though it's an all-too-obvious spin on the old Full Monty gimmick - a bunch of loveable English people doing something naughty for a good cause - Calendar Girls remains an entertaining diversion. Based on real-life events where the middle-aged members of a ladies' social club decided to raise money for their hospital by posing nude for a calendar (their private… read more!
Call Me by Your Name
Critics everywhere have been falling over themselves with praise for this film. I confess that I am not sharing the love. Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel, Call Me By Your Name recounts the summer of 1983, as spent by Elio (Timothée Chalamet), a bored 17-year-old "stuck" in Northern Italy with his parents, an archaeology professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a French/Italian… read more!
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
A strange little film with an excellent cast and a decidedly downbeat atmosphere, I'm not sure who exactly Can You Ever Forgive Me? is meant to appeal to. Personally, I liked it, but with its quiet cringe and low-rent bitterness, I can't recommend it to everyone. Melissa McCarthy has arrived at the stage of her career where she wants to… read more!
Cape of Good Hope
Amidst the crowd of studio blockbusters and Oscar-hopefuls released in December 2005 is this modest charmer from South Africa, about the multi-ethnic employees of a Cape Town animal shelter and their relationships with their families and romantic partners. It's refreshing to see so many unknown actors - unknown to these American eyes, anyway - who take to their roles with… read more!
Capote
At first, the title of this film seems inaccurate: This biopic doesn't encapsulate Truman Capote's entire life, from cradle to grave. It's solely about the five years in which the famous writer (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) wrote his true crime masterpiece In Cold Blood. But on second thought, the film isn't about the creative process or the relationship between… read more!
Captain America: Civil War
I can't break down this film's plot to the uninitiated without feeling like an idiot. It's just too convoluted. Thankfully, Marvel presumes – arrogantly but correctly – that the uninitiated won't be seeing Captain America: Civil War. You pretty much have to be all caught up with Captain America: The Winter Soldier as well as Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man to get what's going on. I'll assume you are,… read more!
Captain America: The First Avenger
The Marvel juggernaut just keeps forging ahead, with its third – I think – summer 2011 superhero movie, and the fifth(!) official prequel to 2012's much-hyped blockbuster The Avengers. One thing I will give Marvel credit for: the studio has shown panache in picking just the right director for each title. Since this movie is set in 1942, who better… read more!
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Because Captain America: The First Avenger took place mostly in World War II, when Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) turned from wimp to hero as he fought off the Red Skull and the HYDRA faction of the Nazi army (or were the Nazis merely a part of HYDRA?), and ended with Cap thawed out just in time for the 21st century… read more!
Captain Marvel
For every movie, and for every person watching that movie, there's what you might call a "line of involvement". A movie's goal is to get you to cross that line – to forget that you're watching actors reciting dialogue in front of a camera and to invest yourself in the story and the characters. Despite my own experiences as a… read more!
Captain Phillips
This movie's so good that writing this review doesn't interest me all that much. There's nothing I can add to what Captain Phillips already successfully says. Tom Hanks comes out of moribundity to give us one of the strongest performances of his career. He is refreshingly uncuddly as the titular captain, a smart, professional, but notably ordinary man who, when… read more!
Capturing the Friedmans
Engrossing documentary about a seemingly ordinary Long Island family that fell apart in 1988 after patriarch Arnold Friedman was caught with child pornography and was subsequently arrested – along with his 18-year-old son, Jesse – for several counts of child molestation. (Arnold taught computers to a number of preteen boys for a couple of years.) Capturing the Friedmans is less… read more!
Carol
Fans of classic films will instantly recognize the opening scene of Carol: two star-crossed paramours (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara) sit silently at a table, staring into each other's eyes, when they are suddenly interrupted by a clueless dimwit. One stands to leave, placing her hand discreetly on the shoulder of her secret lover, then departs, seemingly forever. We then flash back to… read more!
Cars
Yes, it's another charming, high-quality production from Pixar, with well-conceived characters, a clever conceit, beautiful scenery, and flawless animation. So why doesn't Cars measure up to previous Pixar releases? It might be its two-hour length: the film's too long by a good twenty minutes. It might be the overly familiar storyline: hotshot city boy gets stuck in small town, learns… read more!
Cast Away
I feel no guilt in laying out the three acts of Cast Away, as it's important to touch upon each one separately. Act I: A chubby Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a workaholic FedEx representative who is decent enough, but married to his job, and leaves his long-suffering girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) on Christmas in order to tend to work.… read more!
Catch Me If You Can
Enjoyable if feather-light dramatization of the life of Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., a teenage con artist who, for four years in the 1960s, evaded the FBI while writing millions of dollars' worth of forged checks and posing as an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. Abagnale's story practically screamed, "This would make a great movie!" In the end, it… read more!
Catfish
In 2007, twentysomething New York photographer Yaniv Schulman, the brother of one of Catfish's directors, started receiving painted copies of his work in the mail, apparently created by a young Michigan girl named Abby. Schulman's brother Ariel and their friend Henry Joost decided – rather suspiciously, I think – to make a documentary about Schulman's budding friendship with this child… read more!
Cats
The big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera was a flop. The big-screen adaptation of The Cat in the Hat, featuring Mike Myers in gruesome cat makeup, was a flop. You'd think Hollywood would have learned from this. And yet we now have Cats, essentially a CG-laden hybrid of Phantom and Cat in the Hat. And it,… read more!
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
I am not a fan of this current wave of 3D movies. I've only seen a handful of studio pictures that use the format, and it seems as though the directors are so hell-bent on avoiding the hammy old "Gotcha!" shots – the paddle-ball-at-the-camera stunts from '50s 3D flicks like House of Wax – that they've drained the joy out… read more!