A beguiling fable about transition and transformation, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) reconfirms Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul as one of the medium’s most mesmeric visionaries. Set in the humid, gauzy northern Thailand jungles, where fifty years earlier the indigent citizens were…

Exhilarating, exasperating, inspired and redundant, Enter the Void is a film of equal parts greatness and silliness, a psychedelic head-trip that only irregularly achieves the grandeur it seeks. Expanding upon many of the ideas addressed in his prior Irreversible, Gaspar Noé’s latest is often a frustratingly shallow creation in terms of characterizations, dialogue and narrative…

A multilayered portrait of immense physical, emotional and psychological change, Kimberly Reed’s Prodigal Sons charts the filmmaker’s high school reunion homecoming to Helena, Montana, a trip made uncomfortable by the fact that Reed left the state a man (and star quarterback, no less) named Paul, and now returns years later a transgendered woman. Her documentary…

When it comes to chic cinematic action, Milla Jovovich may be the poor woman’s Angelina Jolie, but her Resident Evil saga continues to be one of the millennium’s only adequate B-movie franchises. In this fourth installment, the first to be helmed by creator Paul W. S. Anderson since 2002’s original, as well as the maiden…

A character study whose two protagonists don’t resemble human beings but intricately assembled screenwriter constructions, Jack Goes Boating proves an inauspicious start to the directorial career of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars in this adaptation of Bob Glaudini’s 2007 play. Hoffman previously presented Glaudini’s work at New York City’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. Yet…

Never Let Me Go has a premise at odds with itself, a conflicted condition that can’t be salvaged by a trio of fine performances. Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed 2005 novel concerns the romantically prickly relationship in 1970s England of three friends – Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and the boy they…

If you’re buying what Catfish is selling, might I also interest you in some power plant-area property I’m looking to unload? Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s film purports to be a straight-shooting documentary account of the relationship that formed between Schulman’s 24-year-old Manhattan photographer brother Nev and the family of an 8-year-old Michigan artistic prodigy…

The Expendables opens with lights emerging out of darkness but, alas, there’s no luster to the stars corralled by Sylvester Stallone for this wannabe-throwback to Reagan-era macho mayhem. For this few-against-many adventure, Stallone surrounds himself with musclebound cohorts, from 21st century stud Jason Statham, to a host of old vets (Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey…

As in Wanted, Angelina Jolie’s fashion model looks and steely fierceness make her a riveting center of action attention in Salt. And like that prior summer effort, her latest is an underwhelming vehicle for her talents, an espionage-tinged chase film in which her CIA agent Evelyn Salt is accused by a former Soviet bigwig-turned-defector (Daniel…