Acting is the lifeblood of Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queens, a full-bodied melodrama about paternity, filial loyalty, and the constant quest for love, happiness, solace and sanity. Desplechin’s film begins as two concurrent stories about ex-spouses Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) and Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric), the former a single mother dealing with her father’s dwindling health while…

On the basis of Me and You and Everyone We Know, precious eccentricity seems to be Miranda July’s filmmaking signature. And though such a delicate mood of weird, bemused cuteness can border on the infuriating, July’s debut feature film (which she wrote and directed after years as a celebrated conceptual artist) generally maintains a lovely…

Mystical wolves (called “wolfen”) are roaming the streets of New York City, and the only person capable of matching their steely, murderous resolve is Albert Finney’s emotionally detached detective Dewey Wilson. Hunting rich and poor alike, these ancient creatures are the focal point of Wolfen, though Michael Wadleigh’s clunky thriller is in fact some sort…

Staging a fight between a grouchy quadriplegic and a murderous monkey isn’t, in theory, a bad idea. George A. Romero’s Monkey Shines, however, is so clumsy that its climactic fight between wheelchair-bound Allan (Jason Beghe) and helper monkey Ella is simply its last instance of slipping on the proverbial cinematic banana peel. After Allan is…

Legendary private dick Philip Marlowe gets a ‘70s makeover in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, a droll, cunning and magnificently woozy adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s final Marlowe mystery. Counterculture über-schlep Elliot Gould transforms the detective from a tough-talking, fast-acting gumshoe into a sloppy, reactive dreamer, but the brilliance of Altman’s film is that it nonetheless…

It makes sense that Tobe Hooper’s 1986 sequel-that-nobody-wanted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, rather than futilely trying to replicate its illustrious predecessor’s gritty, uncompromising terror, instead opts for campy humor. Still, it’s nonetheless surprising to discover that the 180-degree tonal switcharoo works. Thirteen years after the original Lone Star state slaughter, Leatherface (Bill Johnson), scalp-eating…

Long regarded as John Carpenter’s first outright failure, Prince of Darkness is perhaps the greatest satanic horror story-by-way-of-quantum physics ever put to film. Which doesn’t, admittedly, make it all that great. But what’s lacking in Carpenter’s wacked-out thriller – decent make-up for his demonically possessed ghouls, passable performances from his bland cast, a credit sequence…

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) George A. Romero returns to the grisly scene of his greatest ghoulish triumphs with Land of the Dead, and the results are about as lively as a piece of roadkill. Set some years after 1985’s Day of the Dead, Romero’s latest zombiefest posits a world in which the living…

The first major studio production filmed in 3-D, André de Toth’s House of Wax wastes an idiotic amount of time showing off its then-nifty special effects (were two appearances by the man with the ping-pong paddle really necessary?). But as was so often the case, Vincent Price brings a touch of creepy class to this…