As summer winds down to August, all those movies that studios either couldn’t make sense of or otherwise couldn’t cut it get unleashed on the public. Consequently August is a kind of limbo; most of the releases have the hallmark of a blockbuster but aren’t quite “award season” material. They’re somewhere in between. As with February, some serious gems can slip in under the radar. But there’s a lot of chaff to get through to find that wheat.
Bureau Chiefs Dorian Wright and Ken Lowery take a look at the upcoming …

In Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character goes to a shady, back alley doctor (Peter Stormare) to get his eyeballs replaced. While Cruise recovers, a wall-sized television projects an image or Robert Ryan shooting a man in a Japanese-style hot tub.
That short, violent, beautifully shot scene comes from Samuel Fuller’s brutal 1955 noir classic House of Bamboo, and it seems an odd reference for Spielberg to make. While Spielberg is a technically brilliant director on many levels, he lacks the sensibility to make a movie …

Give the advertising campaign credit: “Who is Salt?” isn’t just a marketing tagline, but the question you’ll find yourself asking over and over as Salt unreels before you. At first Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) appears to be a CIA agent with a loving husband and a normal life, but it isn’t long before she’s crossing and double-crossing people without explaining to anyone, least of all the audience, why she’s doing what she’s doing.
And on paper, that’s kind of a nifty idea. Salt is undeniably the protagonist of the movie; we …

“Riders to the stars, that is what we are, every time we kiss in the night”: so begins the theme song to the 1954 sci-fi film, Riders to the Stars. I get the distinct feeling that the writers of this song weren’t given a lot of direction regarding the movie’s plot.
After the opening titles and theme song, a voice-over narrator explains that humans have conquered every challenge except one: space. Yeah, it sure was nice to have every conceivable human problem licked by 1954…
Riders to the …

Christopher Nolan’s characters live in a world of ideas. They’re trapped by them, enslaved by them, dominated by them and ruled by them. They are fallible people who externalize every lash on their souls; their gestures change the world and they know it, but they know also that they will never live up to the abstract ideals they forever chase or evade. They are haunted by dreams dashed, lost, or inadequately conceived.
Therefore it seems predestined that Nolan would eventually tap Leonardo DiCaprio to play one of his leads. DiCaprio has …

Movies in the film noir genre are known for having a bleak view of human nature, but few are as overwhelmingly bleak as Edmund Goulding’s 1947 adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s classic noir novel Nightmare Alley. The movie traces the rise and fall of con man Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) as he goes from side show barker to nightclub mentalist to spiritual advisor for Chicago’s wealthiest citizens, all the while using and leaving behind the people that aid his success. Instead of a conventional morality that divides humans into good …