Sleeping With Other People Watch Movie Online

Sleeping With Other People

Movie morals tell us that in the horror genre, the two leads of writer/director Leslye Headland's cheater love story "Sleeping with Other People" would not survive the first act. Likewise, in a Hollywood romantic comedy they'd be all alone at the end, designated as "the wrong one" in the shadow of cleaner, more monogamous leads. In a refreshing change to these unwritten rules, Headland's Sundance indie "Sleeping with Other People" is about two promiscuous New Yorkers who are not exempt from meaningful relationships, they just can't resist the urges that destroy them. As Headland defined the movie herself at the Utah festival during its world premiere, "Sleeping with Other People" is "'When Harry Met Sally' for assholes."

Sleeping With Other People Watch Movie Online

In the film, Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie play decent people albeit with darker pasts. Jake (Sudeikis) is a well-known womanizer and romantically challenged, who will go so far as to cheat to break up relationships instead of nobly. Meanwhile, the woman he lost his virginity to in college, Lainey (Brie), has just destroyed another relationship by cheating on them with recurring fling Matthew (Adam Scott), an OB/GYN who cheats on his own wife with her. Of all places, Jake and Lainey reconnect years later outside of a sex addiction meeting, and with their shared problems they begin a friendship that becomes strictly platonic. They spend a lot of time together, but especially with Lainey going to medical school soon, and Jake's penchant to ditch anyone that he sleeps with, they decide to keep their connection hands-off, but to still confide in sexual details as they look for love in other people. This is not so easy, as all romantic comedies also tell us. As their friendship develops, the movie take on its own brand of romance, with openly sexual repartee and an explosive amount of bottled hormones between its two romantic leads.
As the member of the movie couple that has to face her darkness more head-on, Lainey is a breakout role for Brie (previously more noted on the silver screen for supporting roles). She treats this character with a organic sweetness, but also a liberated sense of humor, as with a scene in which, while on drugs, she dances to David Bowie's "Modern Love" to entertain kids at a birthday party. Brie nicely balances the movie's typical, and atypical features as it blazes a trail for other endearingly flawed rom-com leads to come.
Headland is in full control of her moral compass. There's not a phrase of judgment or slut-shaming to be found in this film about serial cheaters, nor is any discussion muted about sexual content. Sex is not means for punishment, but an open, powerful subject. And even when the story focuses on the characters' self-inflicted darkness, they have a high self-awareness. "Sleeping with Other People" has a mainstream look, including walk-and-talk scenes in Central Park or the middle of NYC traffic. It's a smooth variation on the type of tale we've heard before, but especially with characters like these, it can still have something new to say.

Breathe Watch Movie Online

Breathe

Teenage girls yearn to connect. It's an impulse that is so strong that if one is left outside the charmed circle of belonging the whole world can fall apart. It's like being banished from a very powerful cult. Who you are depends on how you are perceived. Betrayal and manipulation, occurring beneath parental notice, is savage. Mélanie Laurent's second feature, "Breathe," based on a popular YA novel, understands the addictive sensations of a new friendship, its thrilling swing into merging, and its dizzying plunge into hurt and rage. It's a confident and scary film.

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When Sarah (Lou de Laâge) first appears in school, she carries with her the self-aware glamour of the "new girl." She ingratiates herself immediately with everyone in school by whispering the correct answer to a kid stumped at the blackboard in math class. She smokes cigarettes from Nigeria and talks about her mother who works for an NGO in Africa. In gym class, she leaps onto the balance beam, standing suspended in the air, with one leg stretched out behind her, a vision of stillness and self-confidence. In the pack-mentality of high school, Sarah is an individual. It's seductive.
Shy asthmatic Charlie (Joséphine Japy) is thrilled when Sarah seems to choose hervas a best friend. Charlie's home life is upsetting. Her parents (Isabelle Carré and Radivoje Bukvicon) are so engrossed in breaking up, getting back together and then breaking up again, that they barely pay her any attention. Charlie and Sarah spend hours on the phone together, sneaking cigarettes in the school bathroom, going out dancing, their involvement so hermetically sealed that it is as though no one exists on the planet but the two of them.
There are danger signs early on. Sarah, with a breezy air of plausible deniability, drives a wedge between Charlie and her childhood friend Victoire (Roxane Duran). Watch how she does it during a scene when the three of them walk home from school. You almost can't catch her at it. Then, on a weekend trip with Charlie's family, Sarah pursues the guy interested in Charlie's mother. There's something ruthless about it. De Laâge is riveting all around, but is most compelling in those moments when she is not the center of attention. She goes entirely flat, waiting, waiting for the spotlight to turn her way again. Once the equilibrium is destabilized, Charlie starts to flail. Instead of backing off, she clings. Both have something the other wants. The gaps in personality, confidence, circumstance, are filled by the all-encompassing presence of the other.
The film takes off once the honeymoon period is over. The real strength of "Breathe" is in the fact that Sarah is not villainized, although her behavior is often monstrous. Of course, she has secrets: her breezy conversation about her awesome selfless mother would be clocked by an FBI profiler as nonsense in about 2 seconds. Perhaps her lies are a survival mechanism. She eventually experiences Charlie's interest in her as intrusive, even though she had courted Charlie like a "mark" from the get-go.
Details interest Laurent as a director: the silences, the body language, the collage-aspect to teenage life (classes, homework, parents, parties, phone calls). Events are presented in isolated images: Charlie playing knock-hockey with friends; whispering on the phone with Sarah; Sarah and Charlie wandering through a field the air golden and peaceful. The story is linear (unlike the book, which is told in flashback), but the style is fragmentary, deceptively casual. There are a couple of stand-out shots, the most stunning being a long tracking-shot along the exterior of a building, where we see Sarah's home life through the windows as the camera passes by. Charlie's rage at being left out of Sarah's warm glow has resulted in stalker-like behavior, and that shot is a disturbing representation of it.
Japy, at first, seems to have the more cliched wallflower role. But there are details in the performance that show us otherwise: her deadpan expression as she approaches her unhappy home, the sense that rage is there in her, rage she has no idea how to handle. Being rejected by Sarah doesn't exactly bring out an "I won't be ignored, Dan" reaction, but it's close. She wants answers: Why is she "out" now? What did she do? Self-loathing is irresistible. de Laâge shows a masterful understanding of a fragile girl who has created a persona that works for her, helps her navigate. She is narcissistic and depends on the attention of others. She's brutal, but she can also be vulnerable, supportive and fun.
Watching events unfold is almost a despairing experience, bringing up feelings of "Why can't they work it out?", with the corollary being "Why can't girls stop doing this to each other?" Margaret Atwood's novel "Cat's Eye" is one of the most accurate portrayals of the viciousness of little girls, viciousness that is invisible to authority figures, and "Breathe" is in that pantheon. Women look at one another and know the score. The response can be one of empathy ("Oh my God, you do that too?") or it can be one of rejection ("You're like that, but I'm NOT.") Sarah's cutting observations on Charlie's behavior have truth in them, hurtful though they may be. Charlie does need to let it go. But Sarah gave her something she wanted, belonging, importance. She wants it back. The fact that Sarah has played her like a violin is incomprehensible to Charlie.
Cinema is filled with stories of intense and manipulative female friendships, friendships that sometimes tip over into folie a deux situations like "Heavenly Creatures" or "Don't Deliver Us From Evil". Women will stab you in the back. Women will steal your husband. Women will start gossip campaigns to destroy your reputation. Laurent knows all that, but never lets her story derail into cliche. This is well-observed stuff, the hysteria of a new friendship, and the moments when the abyss opens up, yawning underneath what once seemed perfect.

The New Girlfriend Watch Movie Online

With its combination of potentially volatile story elements—including offbeat comedy, melodrama, undertones of suspense and an extremely fluid contemplation of contemporary sexual mores—“The New Girlfriend" is a sort of cinematic high-wire act in which even the slightest misstep could send the entire thing crashing to the ground in a mess of smutty farce and mawkish soap operatics. Not only does the film keep itself aloft for the duration, one of its greatest pleasures is seeing how filmmaker Francois Ozon manages to find just the right note for such challenging material. He transforms what might have been a tonal nightmare in other hands into a wildly entertaining work, one that manages to be simultaneously funny, touching, slightly unnerving and undeniably sexy to behold, regardless of where your predilections may lie.

The New Girl Friend

The film opens with a funeral, then charts the lifelong friendship between Claire (Anais Demoustier) and Laura (Isild Le Besco) from the moment that they first meet at the age of seven, and become instant BFFs through first loves and first heartbreaks to their marriages—Laura to the dashing David (Romain Duris) and Claire to Gilles (Raphael Personnaz). It seems so perfect that one awaits the other shoe to drop, and it soon does when Laura unexpectedly takes ill and soon dies, leaving a devastated David to raise their infant daughter, Lucie, alone and an equally bereft Claire to cope with her equally profound sense of loss. Since she is Lucie's godmother, Claire decides that the best way to deal with the tragedy is to do all that she can to help David care for the girl whenever she can. One day, she goes over to their house unannounced and when she goes in, she sees a strange woman holding the baby that turns out to be David in a wig, makeup and one of Laura's dresses.
Needless to say, Claire is more than a bit taken aback by this sight, and David is forced to explain things. For as long as he can remember, he's had a thing about wearing women's clothing, though he stresses that this desire has nothing to do with sexuality and that he is still straight. When he met and married Laura, this compulsion receded; now that she has gone, the desire has returned full-force. As an added side benefit, Lucie, who is too young to remember Laura in anything but the most general of details, seems to be responding well to this ersatz version of her. Once she comes down from the initial shock, Claire is willing to embrace this new side to David and even helps him to further develop this new side to him by dubbing this alter ego "Virginia," showing her how to act more feminine and even taking him out into the real world to interact with others as a woman.
With a set-up like this, "The New Girlfriend" could go in any number of narrative directions, ranging from dark suspense (as was apparently the case with Ruth Rendell short story's from which, according to the credits, it was "loosely adapted") to the kind of semi-transgressive, self-aware melodrama that Pedro Almodovar built his career upon. Without going into too much detail so as not to spoil anything, the film goes off in a number of directions that nevertheless manage to flow together with surprising grace. There is a lot of humor to be had in the story, and for the most part, it manages to eschew the usual broad hijinks that occur when a man turns up dressed as a woman; at one point, David is forced to make a quick change when his former mother-in-law arrives unexpectedly but forgets to remove his lipstick.

At the same time, there is a serious side to the story as Claire finds herself keeping the existence of Virginia a secret from the more straight-laced Gilles and David dealing with his own identity issues. Meanwhile, conventional notions of gender and sexuality are constantly being reexamined and revised throughout—beyond the obvious involving David/Virginia, Claire also goes through a change as well as she assumes a more masculine presence, both when she and Virginia are out in public together, and in bed with Gilles.
Ozon's screenplay is clever and intriguing throughout, while still maintaining a clear through line for viewers to follow even when things start getting really complicated. The performances are strong across the board—Duris finds the humor and pathos in his character without ever becoming a cartoon, Demoustier (who in many ways has the trickier role when you think about it) is wonderful in the way that she helps to navigate viewers through the increasingly tricky emotional and sexual waters and, as the more conservative-leaning husband, Personnaz brings life and personality to a character that could have easily become a caricature. All the technical aspects are top-notch as well, and the film even manages to pull off the difficult trick of putting a man in a dress and not making it look like an old Milton Berle routine—Duris may not be 100% convincing as a woman but he certainly comes closer to that mark than most on-screen cross-dressing attempts manage to achieve.
Although his name may not be that well-known outside of auteurist circles, Francois Ozon is one of the most audacious filmmakers on the world cinema scene today, especially when it comes to sexually charged material. Among his efforts are the international hit "Swimming Pool", "In the House" and the teen call girl drama "Young and Innocent." Even when he isn't dealing with overtly erotic material, he is always out there trying to provide audiences with something new and unexpected—his wild "8 Women" brought together eight of France's top actresses (including veterans Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Fanny Ardant and Danielle Darrieux and relative newcomers Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier) for a musical murder mystery—and even when he stumbles, as was the case with 2009's "Ricky", a baffling fable about a baby born with a pair of wings that allow him to fly, he still goes down swinging for the fences. "The New Girlfriend" is a film that finds him at the top of his game, and the results will intrigue and arouse audiences in equal measure.

Finders Keepers Watch Movie Online

“Finders Keepers” is the odyssey of a rogue amputated leg, as found in a grill that was left for months in an abandoned storage locker. After its discovery, two men from Maiden, North Carolina fought for custody of it. John Wood—small, sunny-eyed and low-key—was the biological owner of the leg; it was removed from his body after a plane crash, and months later, after his own ways of trying to preserve it (as a memorial for his father who died in that crash) he ditched the leg in that infamous smoker. However, Shannon Whisnant, towering and with a melodic drawl, was the one who technically bought the grill, and the leg that came with it; he used the public’s curiosity about the event, the grill, and the foot to become a bit of a local celebrity. (In pure poetry, Shannon has a bum left leg, the same side as the amputated limb). The two took their odd but straight-faced quarrel to international media, eventually leaving the foot’s fate up to an appearance on reality TV court show “Judge Mathis.”

Finders Keepers Watch Movie Online

Finders Keepers

Needless to say, this is a story that tells itself. If some documentary filmmakers are like gold miners, scouring to find a phenomenal nonfictional story within heaps and heaps of less-interesting ones, “Finders Keepers” is that piece of gold which directors Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel were lucky to find before anyone else did. This is a story that comes with rich, fascinating subjects, atmosphere, fantastic dialogue, (“He thought he was gonna be, y’know, the next Billy Bob Thornton!”) insatiable costume design, and a bizarre chain of events, all waiting for a documentarian’s vision (as is often the case, fiction film could never do this justice). At one time, this was the type of pursuit that led to Errol Morris’ “Gates of Heaven.” Now, in the spirit of that albeit untouchable film we have “Finders Keepers,” a fantastic story that touches upon all-American notions of celebrity, redemption, family, justice, class, meme culture—all which came together with a kooky news segment.
This Sundance 2015 selection and winner of “Best Comedy” at the 2015 Traverse City Film Festival is a ridiculous story indeed, as John’s mother Peg will state herself, or the grin on his brother-in-law Tom will nudge, as he shares his talking head offerings like he were about to finish telling a joke. But “Finders Keepers” succeeds with a staggering amount of empathy when its narrative focuses more on a prized foot, and centers on two men experiencing life phenomenons bigger than them. The film invests a lot of time in talking head reflections of John's addictions, and the apex of self-destruction he hit because of the money and attention given to him by the foot fiasco. Meanwhile, Shannon tries to understand his degree of celebrity, boasting big dreams of becoming a beloved, wealthy entertainer through his reality show appearances; a fantastic but crushing moment in the third act shows Shannon experiencing first-hand a reality show audience’s attention span for him as “The Foot Man."
Inserted news reports label these eccentric events as a “freak show” but “Finders Keepers” unquestionably resists a mean spirit. This doc doesn’t get into the type of designation of heroes and villains, as previously chosen previously by one of its producers, Seth Gordon, who broke into filmmaking with 2007’s “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.” (Although that doc’s nemesis Billy Mitchell does get an “Awesome Thanks” in this film’s closing credits). “Finders Keepers” wisely and warmly treats John and Shannon, both Davids to society as a Goliath, with a caring touch, expressing their very human nature defined by the comedy and tragedy within each. Their story is immensely entertaining, but the lunacy of these events is never out of their own understanding.
Carberry & Tweel are pretty sharp as to how much the story tells itself, and often don’t mess with its natural order. On the other hand, aside from some driving score choices, or some select, pretty shots of B-roll, it’s as if the filmmaking loses personality to the eccentricities of everyone on screen. And in terms of assembly, “Finders Keepers” is a tad messy—we know that reenactments were filmed earlier than the leads’ dominating interviews (per Shannon’s haircut as a time mark), but we aren’t sure where the filming exactly takes place in the overall foot saga, especially as the impressions John and Shannon have on each other seem to change throughout. It’s an unnecessary distraction that overcomplicates a story that proves to have a beautiful, simple grace.
In a very rare reflex even for the moves I already treasure, I was moved to watch "Finders Keepers" again immediately after the first viewing. This documentary is just so welcoming—and for events that defy believability—that I wanted more time in its atmosphere (the 83-minute running time is still just right). Sometimes you just find something that grabs ahold of you.
In one of "Finders Keepers'" greatest gifts, it is inspiring how clear and clean the filmmaker's intentions are, especially against public opinion's regular impulse to quantify unusual headline subjects as memes from a 15-minute circus (the film wonderfully continues the ideas from the end of "Amy," which is also one of the best documentaries of the year). "Finders Keepers" is able to pack in all of this bizarre tale's inherently kooky colors—and have a great deal of fun with them—but its heart is always in the right place.

The Walk Watch Movie Online

In terms of sheer directorial craft, "The Walk" is masterful, but as storytelling, it's a near-disaster.That's too bad, because nobody does visceral like Robert Zemeckis. Even in his less-than-great films, there are always two or three sequences that dazzle the viewer, often by evoking the sights and sounds of an extraordinary experience in such a way that you feel as if you're participating in them along with the characters. "The Walk," Zemeckis' account of Phillippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the old World Trade Center, would seem to be the ultimate Zemeckis set piece, rivaling the awesomeness of the plane crash and island sequences of "Cast Away," the upside-down jet maneuver in "Flight," the intergalactic wormhole trips in "Contact," and the small-scaled relentlessness of the suspense sequences in his under-appreciated 2000 thriller "What Lies Beneath" (which wrung tremendous excitement from the question of whether a nearly paralyzed woman could use her big toe to remove the stopper from a bathtub drain).

The Walk Watch Movie Online

The Walk

The final half-hour of "The Walk" is on that level. It's hard to imagine how it could have done a better job imagining every physical detail of the hero's unmatched physical achievement. Following the movie's New York Film Festival premiere, there were reports of people throwing up in the men's room after suffering virtual vertigo while watching Petit (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) stroll, turn and even lie down upon a cable stretched between the towers. In this respect, "The Walk" does not disappoint. Zemeckis is on a short list, along with Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock, of filmmakers who understand how to fuse audacity with simplicity, so that the scale of the flourishes in their biggest sequences is wed to recognizable emotions. He makes sure that you don't just understand how Petit did what he did, but what he might have been feeling during every step of his journey, and what he saw and heard. The metallic creak of the cable as Petit walks; the rustle and hiss of wind passing over his clothes and through his hair; the muffled sound of traffic noises floating up from 110 stories below: "The Walk" makes these and other sensations palpable, along with Petit's delight, defiance and moments of doubt and fear.
If only Zemeckis had faith in his filmmaking power! What "The Walk" is missing, unfortunately, is an ability to recognize when poetry and mystery are enough and should be left alone to breathe. Here is a movie about a man whose life was defined by a daring, unprecedented and now un-repeatable artistic feat (transforming boxy skyscrapers into a stage high above North America's largest city) and who achieved that feat by trusting in his training and bravery and will. But the script, credited to Zemeckis and Christopher Browne, begins diminishing his achievement immediately with tedious chatter, and can't stop doing it.
The movie kicks off with a poorly CGI'd (for Zemeckis) shot of the hero standing in the Statue of Liberty's torch with the Towers looming across the water behind him, talking and talking and talking not to you but at you, often in bizarrely gargoyle-ish close-ups, about the amazing thing he's about to do, or is doing—as if convincing us to buy a ticket to the film we're already sitting there watching.
"You're doing too much!" warns the hero's mentor (scene-stealer Ben Kingsley) early in the movie. "Do nothing!" The movie ignores its own advice. If the point were to show how the hucksterish aspect of Petit diminished his physical feats, and paint a portrait of an insufferable and in some ways untrustworthy salesman-adventurer who's in love with himself, it might have been defensible, but that's not the case. We're supposed to take everything Petit says at face value. We're supposed to adore him. His narration is an insurance policy intended to guarantee audience involvement and make sure we never fail to understand any point.
"The Walk" starts selling itself to you the second you settle into your chair ("To walk on the wire, this is life!" Petit tells us, jamming his face into the lens). It keeps selling and selling and selling itself, telling you how amazing and wondrous everything is via voice-over and straight-into-the-camera narration, verbally explaining things that Zemeckis' images are already doing a peerless job of showing you, sometimes breaking the movie's spell by having the hero chime in with an observation that's nowhere near as eloquent as the sight of Petit doing what only Petit can do. Petit's narration might be the most counterproductive and irritating narration ever to be glommed onto a potentially great motion picture. Suffering through it is like visiting the Grand Canyon or the Metropolitan Museum of Art with someone who keeps exclaiming how incredible and astonishing everything is every fifteen seconds, to the point where you want to leave and come back the next day by yourself so that you have an actual experience.
"And with this pencil stroke, my fate was sealed," the narration tells us, over images of Petit drawing a line between the towers as depicted in a magazine ad that he peruses while waiting to see a doctor—as if we couldn't figure out why that moment is important, in a movie about a guy who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. "This is the beginning of my dream!" The nadir of the movie's poor judgment occurs during its still-mostly-astonishing climax, when Petit lies down on the cable, engulfed in misty cloud cover, and watches a lone gull hovers over him and seems to stare into his eyes, as if wondering if he's some kind of bird, too. The moment has the eerie mesmerizing power of an incantation, but sure enough, here comes Petit in voice-over telling us about how this bird came out of the clouds and hovered there over him and dammit, movie, don't you know we have eyes and ears?
I don't believe in the admonition "show, don't tell." It's a maxim cited by hack screenwriters who make money from how-to books and seminars, not from actual screenwriting. Some of the greatest films in cinema history have active, insistent, even constant narration. But such films are not just telling in place of showing. They're showing while they're telling and telling while they're showing, and the verbal component adds to, and often complicates or subverts, the images and sounds. That's not the case here. Aside from a few practical observations about being an acrobat, there is nary a word of Petit's narration that couldn't be red-lined for redundancy. If what you want is to hear people talk about Petit (including Petit), you might as well buy a copy of the memoir upon which the "The Walk" is based, or watch James Marsh's great 2008 nonfiction film "Man on Wire," which includes so many re-enactments that it's half a drama, anyway.
"The Walk" is worth seeing on a big screen for its final wire walk (intrusive voice-over notwithstanding), for its lovingly recreated images of the World Trade Center, for its often wry humor (including a marvelous running gag involving an elevator operator) and for some of the supporting performances (notably Kingsley's pitch-perfect mentor performance, and James Badge Dale's turn as a wise-ass Franco-American who joins the team infiltrating the towers). Gordon-Levitt is verbally miscast (his Franch acc-SANT is too theatrical and might make you wish they'd cast an actual French actor) but physically convincing; you buy him as a man driven to achieve the impossible, and willing to do the hard work necessary to hone his skills, and you also believe him as a charismatic, selfish leader whose hint of madness is as attractive as it is troubling. But this is ultimately a frustrating work. "The Walk" has everything it needs to be a modern classic, except for an understanding that when you have everything you need to make a such a film, it doesn't need to hype itself and explain itself. It can just be.

Goodnight Mommy Watch Movie Online

Ever since it debuted at last year's Venice Film Festival, the Austrian import "Goodnight Mommy" has been building up a reputation as a horror exercise of the highest order—the kind of film that could supposedly reduce even the hardiest of observers into quivering blobs of jelly squirming in their seats, partly out of what is happening on the screen and partly out of fear of what might be coming just around the corner. As someone who has seen more than his fair share of such films that have failed to live up to their hype over the years, I tend to approach such things with more than a healthy dose of skepticism. In this particular case, the movie in question has more than lived up to its advanced word. In fact, co-filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have conjured an intelligently staged and executed creepfest that takes one of the most universally compelling of notions—the unbreakable bond that exists between a mother and her children—and approaches it in such a formally and narratively bleak manner that it makes the works of fellow countryman Michael Haneke seeming almost benign by comparison.

 Goodnight Mommy Watch Movie Online

Goodnight Mommy

 As the film opens, 10-year-old twin brothers Lukas and Elias (played by real-life twins Lukas and Elias Schwarz) are playing tag in the cornfield outside their isolated home while waiting the return of their mother (Susanne Wuest) from facial surgery. In theory, this should be a joyous time but from the moment she returns home, her head completely swathed in bandages, it quickly becomes apparent that something is not quite right. Instead of the warm and cheerful presence that she apparently was before going away, she is now as cold and remote as the house they uncomfortably share (with its brutally sterile air and large supply of unnerving nooks, crannies and hallways, it seems to have been designed by the people who did the residence of the good doctor from "The Human Centipede") and demands constant quiet and no sunlight to help aid in her recovery. To make matters even more off-putting, she has begun to clearly favor Lukas over Elias, even going so far as to refuse to even speak to the latter for unknown reasons.
Despite her wishes, the brothers are inseparable as they go about spending their time together doing things that range from the perfectly normal (jumping on a trampoline in the rain) to the odd (exploring a nearby tomb) to the downright icky (collecting giant beetles in a fish tank). As time passes and their still-bandaged mother continues to act stranger and crueler, the boys become increasingly convinced that they are dealing with someone who is pretending to be her. Since they have no one else to turn to (their father is briefly referenced once but there isn't even a picture of him in the house and the local priest that they flee to merely brings them back home), they begin plotting amongst themselves, and when the bandages come off, so do the gloves as they tie up the presumed interloper in her bed and begin using such items as scissors, a magnifying glass and their seemingly limitless capacity for cruel invention in the hopes of getting the answers to their questions about who she is and where their real mom might be.
A film like "Goodnight Mommy" is extraordinarily difficult to pull off and not just because of the intense emotional and physical cruelty depicted throughout. For something like this to work, there has to be a believable balance to the narrative for at least most of its running time—we have to understand why the kids would be convinced while at the same time holding out the possibility that they are misunderstanding the situation and that the woman they are torturing really is their mother after all. The screenplay that Franz and Fiala have come up with is fairly ingenious in the way that it toys with audience allegiances by presenting them with a scenario in which neither party is acting logically by any means. Yes, "Mom" comes across as cruel and withholding and it sure seems odd that no one seems to have accompanied her to the hospital or cared for the boys while she was away. On the other hand, the two kids seem just a little too aggressive in their retaliations for comfort. As a result, even as the film begins to head towards its shocking finale, most viewers will still find it difficult to decide who, if anyone, they should be rooting for.
And yet, while the screenplay is a marvel of construction (one that is constantly flipping the page on viewers while still maintaining a certain internal logic), it is only one of the reasons why it works as well as it does. Making their debuts as feature directors, Franz and Fiala demonstrate a genuine gift for filmmaking—they know how to milk a scene for maximum tension without resorting to cheap scares, how to create quieter moments that allow the characters to become more than figures designed solely to be manipulated by the plot and how to mine the increasingly grim happenings for a certain amount of dark humor. (There is one great scene in which the boys attempt to distract visiting Red Cross solicitors in the kitchen in hopes that they don't investigate the odd noises upstairs coming from "the dog.") The three central performances from Wuest and the Schwarz brothers are all excellent in the way that they make the shift from malevolence to sympathy and back again without it ever coming across as forced. Adding to the unnerving quality of the film as a whole is the gorgeously haunting 35mm cinematography by Martin Gschlacht and the quietly unnerving sound design that suffuses even the most ordinary of moments (admittedly a rare sight here) with a sense of dread and uncertainty.
"Goodnight Mommy" is a viciously effective horror film but it is clearly not one for all tastes—some viewers may find it a little too chilly and remote for its own good and those who are put off by the sight of ugly bugs or adorable animals that meet sad ends may find certain parts of it to be unforgivable. However, those with stronger constitutions will find it to be an excursion to the cinematic dark side that is a million times removed from such recent genre gibberish as "Unfriended" or "The Gallows." Are you that type of viewer? Here is a question. I mentioned Michael Haneke earlier in this review—did you see and enjoy (perhaps not the right word) both versions of his highly controversial "Funny Games"? If so, this should be right up your alley. If not—well, you have been warned.

Vacation Watch Movie Online

Last week, as I was walking out of a screening of “Vacation,” a fellow critic, engaged in passionate argument with some other colleagues, pointed at me and said, “You! I heard YOU laughing.” And I said, well, yes, I was laughing, at some particular parts
My poor friend was searching, perhaps desperately at this point, for someone who shared his “c’mon, it wasn’t THAT bad” opinion of the film. And I happen to have, for better or worse, a laugh that’s hard to miss. But I couldn’t go that far with him about this necessarily self-conscious sequel—or is it a reboot?—to the famed “National Lampoon” films of the same name/theme. No way, no how. Because “Vacation” is, minute to minute, one of the most repellent, mean-spirited gross-out comedies it’s ever been my squirmy displeasure to sit through. This relentless farce of humiliation asks us to guffaw at a gruesome highway death, another presumed death by blunt-force trauma and/or drowning and/or (spoiler alert for those who sit through end credits?) bear attack. It locates humor in the sight of a young boy using a used hypodermic needle as a dart launched against his brother, and, at the very end, that brother unearthing his ostensible virility by beating on a snooty teenage girl.

Vacation Watch Movie Online

Vacation

I could go on, and on, and on. But if you’ve seen the trailers, which feature the highway death gag, and the hypo gag, and the set up to the hypo gag (which is that the clueless Griswold family, thinking they’ve discovered a secret, mineral-rich “hot spring,” are revealed to be swimming in a pool of raw sewage and more) you get the tone of the film, which is similar to that of the very popular, and largely vile and hypocritical “Hangover” movies. “Vacation,” like those films, features the affably goofy Ed Helms in a lead role.
Here Helms plays a grown-up Rusty Griswold (the teen son character initially played by Anthony Michael Hall in the 1983 “National Lampoon’s Vacation;” the most famous subsequent Rusty is, I’d say, Johnny Galecki, who played the role in 1989’s “National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation”). Rusty is a pilot for an airline called “Econo-Air,” and in the opening scene, he’s given his hapless nice-guy props by an aged colleague who’s clearly suffering from dementia, and who nearly crashes the plane when Rusty leaves the cockpit for a bathroom break. You remember what I was saying before about the jokes in this movie. After a slick playboy pilot for a more elite carrier (Ron Livingston) obliges Rusty to eat dirt on a shuttle line, Rusty gets home to find discontent in the domestic hearth. His younger son, Kevin (Steele Stebbins) has been tormenting older brother James (Skylar Grisondo), per his usual routine, we are led to believe by beleaguered mom Debbie (Christina Applegate). This time, it’s by magic-markering “James Has A Vagina” on his guitar. You remember what I was saying…
Anyway. I might as well fess up here that the most laughs I got from the movie were via Steele Stebbins as the older-brother-tormenting Kevin. The character as written is typically nasty and foul-mouthed, and it’s pretty clear that directors and co-writers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also wrote “Horrible Bosses,” so, um, yeah) weren’t expecting to get more out of the character than the usual cheap “hey, check out this little kid cursing a blue streak” laughs. But Stebbins—and perhaps I should be more disturbed than amused by this—invests the character with a relentless bad-seed malevolence, a gleeful aura of irredeemability, that’s so mortifying it’s actually often quite funny.
As for the rest of the cast, well, I used to think that Helms, whose upending of Middle American blandness on “The Daily Show” was always reliably droll, did those dreadful “Hangover” films because they paid well; now I wonder that he actually believes these movies are good, and the question unsettles me. But that’s life. Christina Applegate, whose work on “Married With Children” gave her valuable experience in playing characters whose dignity, such as it might be, is regularly affronted, shows similar game good spirits in her activities here. Chris Hemsworth, playing Rusty’s brother-in-law, assays an exaggerated Southern accent and strides around with an oversize prosthetic penis, which, again, you probably know from the trailer As the Griswolds drive erratically across the country (the movie doubles down on the imaginary-car-from-hell device of the 1983 original) “Vacation” shows a peculiar perspective on the American character. This Made-In-USA clan suffers abasement after abasement, literally swimming in feces at one point, but still soldiers on in pursuit of a cherished goal—a sojourn to Walley World. And even there, degradation awaits. And these dumb, wan, mediocre, sad-sack Americans are too stupid to even understand what’s happening to them, yet too plucky to back down. Perpetual stooges.

Pay The Ghost Watch Movie Online

Nicolas Cage is often accused of taking parts that don’t challenge his undeniable range, especially in recent years as the "paycheck parts" have piled up. His ‘10s output of films like “Rage,” “Outcast,” “Stolen,” “The Frozen Ground” and “Left Behind” make this argument of creative coasting harder to dismiss (and almost more painful considering Cage delivered one of his career-best turns in the middle of this garbage onslaught with “Joe”). Looking over Cage’s resume, I considered the following phrase carefully: “Pay the Ghost,” out in very limited release today, is a new low for Nicolas Cage. Just when you thought he couldn’t get any more apathetic about a role, he pops up in this lazy, boring retread of “Insidious” that even his most diehard fans should ignore.

Pay The Ghost Watch Movie Online

 

Pay The Ghost

Based on a novella by Tim Lebbon, “Pay the Ghost” stars Cage as Mike Lawford, an English teacher who drops references to Lovecraft and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe just so you get the impression that Dan Kay’s screenplay comes with great literary aspirations. (Spoiler: It does not.) Lawford is married to Kristen (Sarah Wayne Callies), and the two have a child named Charlie (Jack Fulton). Of course, Mike is a distant dad, not around enough as he tries to earn tenure at the university where he teaches. On Halloween, Lawford finally gets tenure, and comes home to celebrate with his family. He even convinces his wife to let him take Charlie to a late-night Halloween parade (do those things really happen in NYC in 2015?) Charlie, who has been having odd visions of late, asks dad if they “can pay the ghost,” and abruptly disappears.
A year later, Mike and Kristen have been torn apart by the disappearance of their son, and start to have supernatural visions, including hearing a child screaming and seeing Charlie on a bus. Is Charlie trying to communicate to them from the other side? With a laughably small amount of research, Mike notices that while children who go missing are often found, those who disappear on All Hallow’s Eve rarely come home again. Someone, or something, is abducting kids on October 31^st, and many of the guardians of the abductees tell the same story of the titular phrase being said just before they disappeared. Who is the ghost that must be paid? What must he or she be paid with? Does this have something to do with Cage’s notorious IRS problems?
It’s amazing how long “Pay the Ghost” drags itself through a feature-length running time with almost nothing to speak of in terms of plot. Charlie disappears, and dad looks for him. The set-up is a slog, as we know there’s no movie without dad making contact with his son again, and there’s absolutely no style or character to get us over the lack of narrative suspense. Cage doesn’t even give it his wide-eyed all; he’s more fun in “Left Behind.” Perhaps presuming that director Uli Edel would actually dramatically ground “Pay the Ghost” in something relatable, Cage actually plays it straight, which eliminates any B-movie fun that could even be had with this misstep. If you’re going to do a lackluster horror movie just for the money, at least try and have some fun with it.
Instead, “Pay the Ghost” does nothing that we haven’t seen done more entertainingly and incisively in other films. It literally has two characters at the 70-minute mark explain the entire narrative—where Charlie is, how to save him, why he was taken, etc.—in back-to-back conversations. It is the apex of lazy screenwriting. At one point, Lawford notes to his class that Washington Irving established the tone of his infamous piece "Sleepy Hollow" with just its name. So does “Pay the Ghost.” It’s to Pay the Bills.

Mad Max: Fury Road Watch Movie Online

George Miller’s “Mad Max” films didn’t just make Mel Gibson a star—they completely transformed post-apocalyptic entertainment with their visceral stunt work and singular vision of an increasingly desperate future. Three decades after the last film, the oft-maligned “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” Miller finally returns to this desolate landscape for the highly-anticipated “Mad Max: Fury Road,” recasting the title role in the grizzled visage of Tom Hardy and upping the stakes with promises of vehicular mayhem on a level commensurate with what modern CGI audiences have come to expect.

From its very first scenes, “Fury Road” vibrates with the energy of a veteran filmmaker working at the top of his game, pushing us forward without the cheap special effects or paper-thin characters that have so often defined the modern summer blockbuster. Miller hasn’t just returned with a new installment in a money-making franchise. The man who re-wrote the rules of the post-apocalyptic action genre has returned to show a generation of filmmakers how they’ve been stumbling in their attempts to follow in his footsteps.

Mad Max: Fury Road Watch Movie Online

Mad Max: Fury Road

“Who was more crazy? Me, or everyone else?” In “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Miller has pushed his Gilliam-esque vision of a world gone mad to its logical extreme. No longer are the people of Max Rockatansky’s world merely scavengers for oil or power; they have been transformed into creatures of circumstance, either left with one defining need or left without any semblance of reason. “Fury Road” is a violent film, but the violent acts in this world don’t feel like arbitrary action beats—they emerge from a complete lack of other options or a firm sense of straight-up insanity. Miller’s new vision of Max isn’t a warrior. Rather, he’s a man driven by the memories of past sins to do little more than survive. He walks with the ghosts of those he couldn’t save, and his traveling companions have pushed him to the brink of sanity.
While wandering at this edge, Max is kidnapped and transformed into a literal blood bag for a feral warrior named Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who serves the whims of his maniacal ruler, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the villain Toecutter in the original “Mad Max”). From the start, Miller gives you no time to “ease” into this world or the story he wants to tell. The frame rate is accelerated, the editing is hyperactive, the bad guy speaks through a mask that makes half his dialogue indecipherable (shades of Hardy’s Bane from “The Dark Knight Rises”), and the horrific visions of Miller’s twisted future come fast and furious. Immortan Joe is a barely-alive freak of nature, kept breathing by tubes connected to his face and served by similarly disfigured half-humans with definitive names like Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and The People Eater (John Howard).
One of Joe’s most notable warriors is a powerful woman known as Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who, as the film opens, is leading a convoy from Immortan Joe’s citadel to the oil refinery Gastown when she deviates off course. It turns out that Furiosa has kidnapped Joe’s “breeders,” the women he keeps prisoner in an effort to create a male heir. She’s taking them to “the green place,” to safety. Of course, Joe sends his men after Furiosa—including Nux, to whom Max is still attached—and the rest of “Mad Max: Fury Road” consists of one long sustained chase across the unforgiving desert. With the exception of one centerpiece of dialogue, the film takes place almost entirely on the move, speeding, chasing, bouncing, and exploding across Miller’s scorched landscape.
As a reflection of more desperate times, Miller has updated the needs of his future world from commodities like oil to pure survival. Max has been reimagined as a fighting, driving machine, a man who “finds his own way,” moving forward in an attempt to outrun his ghosts. Nux is a brainwashed goon, a man-creature who believes that he will die and be reborn after sacrificing himself for a trip to Valhalla. Max eventually steps into the role of the action hero, but, in one of his most daring moves, Miller gives the weight of the narrative to Furiosa, a woman who holds on to the only thing that could possibly give her hope in this violent world—the next generation. Theron does arguably the best work of her career here, artfully conveying the drive in Furiosa’s soul in a way that fuels the entire film. She does more with a searing stare or clenched jaw than most actresses could with a page of dialogue. And one shouldn’t undervalue the empowerment message at the heart of this film—Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues” consulted with Miller on the script—which suggests that women, as the creators of new life, will, inherently, always be the gender that holds hardest onto hope for the future. Furiosa looks at the insanity of the male leadership around her and decides enough is enough. When one of Furiosa’s wards goes into labor and still defends herself and her yet-to-be-born child (after being shot no less), it’s hard not to see “Fury Road” as an answer to the macho nonsense that so often defines the action genre.
But none of that should remotely imply that the action here is lost in the message. The pacing, the sound design, the editing, the music (courtesy of Junkie XL and some of Joe’s freaks who play drums and electric guitars during the action), and even the emotional stakes are all so far above average that they make just about any other car-chase movie look like a quaint Sunday drive by comparison. The first chase in “Fury Road,” as Joe’s men catch up to Furiosa and her precious cargo, is one of the most remarkable action sequences in film history. And that’s really just a warm-up. It’s no exaggeration to say that, if you think something in “Fury Road” is the most breathtaking action stunt you’ve seen in years, you really need only wait a few minutes to see something better. This is a movie where you keep thinking that its reached its apex and then, inexplicably, that moment is left behind in the dust.
From the very beginning, Miller and his team do something that so many other filmmakers fail to do—they define the geography of their action. Rather than merely tossing the camera around in the vain hopes of creating tension, they constantly give the viewer overhead shots and clear physical dimensions of what’s happening and where we’re going. And then they blow it all up. There are dozens of crashes, explosions, and flying bodies in “Fury Road,” and yet the piece never gets repetitive, especially as the emotional stakes increase with each sequence. Miller knows when to let the pace coast when it needs to, which is rarely, and then he pushes the pedal down and plasters you to your seat.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” is an action film about redemption and revolution. Never content to merely repeat what he’s done before (even the first three “Mad Max” have very distinct personalities), Miller has redefined his vision of the future yet again, vibrantly imagining a world in which men have become the pawns of insane leaders and women hold fiercely onto the last vestiges of hope. “Fury Road” would be remarkable enough as a pure technical accomplishment—a film that laughs in the face of blockbuster CGI orgies with some of the best editing and sound design the genre has ever seen—and yet Miller reaches for something greater than technical prowess. He holds aloft the action template that he created with “The Road Warrior” and argues that Hollywood shouldn’t have been copying it for the past three decades, they should have been building on it. “Fury Road” is a challenge to a whole generation of action filmmakers, urging them to follow its audacious path into the genre’s future and, like Miller, try their hardest to create something new.

Sicario Watch Movie Online

“Sicario” opens with two indicators of a violent world, one a discovery and one an explosion, both setting the stage for the satisfying thriller that follows. This is a universe in which evidence of evil exists in plain sight, hiding in the walls of a house in suburban America. And it is a world in which violence can erupt in the blink of an eye, taking lives and shattering others. At times, “Sicario” is a deeply satisfying, intense examination of a war with no rules of engagement, driven by a spectacular performance by Benicio Del Toro and typically mesmerizing cinematography from Roger Deakins. At other times, especially in its middle act, “Sicario” can be frustratingly self-indulgent, filled with overhead helicopter shots of the Mexican border and a thumping, pretentious score. It’s a film that lacks the urgency of the really great thrillers, but exists in that rarefied air of refined production values on every level and a flawless ensemble. That it falls short of greatness could be considered a disappointment, but there’s still much to like here.

Sicarion Watch Movie Online

Sicario

That opening scene features FBI Agent Kate Macy (Emily Blunt) trying to find a kidnap victim in an Arizona home. She literally barrels through the wall in her truck, and just takes down a target as he unloads a shotgun in her direction. The shotgun blasts a hole in the wall, revealing a dead body, wrapped in plastic. And this cadaver is not alone. Soon, they discover the home is filled with corpses, and their investigation leads to an explosion. What is going on? What horror has crossed the border from the notoriously lawless town of Juarez to Arizona?
Macy’s fearlessness and quick wit draws the attention of her superiors, and she’s brought in on a meeting for an inter-agency task force. Led by a mysterious, professionally undefined (he could be CIA) man named Matt (Josh Brolin), the people behind this task force like what they hear from Kate. They bring her aboard, and Matt, Kate and the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) head South to capture a drug trafficker and bring him back to the States for questioning. This sequence alone justifies a look at “Sicario.” Venturing into a part of the continent in which drug lords have become so prominent that dead bodies hang in public places as messages, the team has to act quickly. On the way back from Mexico, they get stuck in traffic at the border. Cars around them could contain the drug trafficker’s cronies, waiting to strike. This scene is a master class in the production of tension. Deakins uses car windows beautifully and editor Joe Walker seamlessly cuts the action together. That the movie never tops this sequence again is where the problems arguably start. We open with such intensity that the lack of sizzle in the second act starts to take a toll.
Part of the problem is that Taylor Sheridan’s script doesn’t really develop a protagonist. Kate is too often an observer, an unwilling and uninformed traveler on this journey. Brolin’s Matt and Del Toro’s Alejandro are so clearly in charge of what’s happening that they’re thinking of moves several machinations away while Kate is unclear of not only what role she’s supposed to play but what roles everyone has as well. I get that this sense of confusion is part of the point. “Sicario,” at its core, is about a world in which the lack of leadership on either side of the drug war has created complete chaos. And so it makes sense that it would feature a protagonist equally confused by the lack of ground rules. However, this makes for a film that doesn’t have the emotional punch of the best thrillers, at least not until the final act when the tables are turned, and we realize that we may have been focusing on the wrong story all along.
Despite the issues I have with the narrative of “Sicario,” it’s impossible to deny the technical elements that are so far above average, and Denis Villeneuve’s skill with directing actors. He draws a great performance from Brolin as the kind of guy who enjoys keeping those around him uninformed. He considers intelligence as a tool to an upper hand. Del Toro has a very different purpose, one that’s slowly revealed, and he’s simply magnetic here. He steals every scene he’s in. Blunt is typically excellent as well, even if it feels like the underdrawn nature of her character is the film’s biggest flaw.
By the time “Sicario” gets to its final act, and Villeneuve and Deakins approach “Zero Dark Thirty” territory through strikes under the cover of darkness with night vision goggles, it’s impossible to nitpick the screenplay. When life and death are in play, such as in that scene on the freeway, and really the entire final act, “Sicario” rises to the level I hoped it would maintain the entire time. It becomes an entire film of that opening scene—a movie of secrets and the threat of constant violence. It’s about a world that we can’t really even comprehend when it comes to its lack of order and degree of atrocities. And it’s in our backyard.

Tomorrowland Watch Movie Online

Early in Brad Bird's science fiction adventure "Tomorrowland," there's a flashback to one of the film's heroes visiting the 1964 World's Fair as a child and sampling Walt Disney's "It's a Small World" ride, with its invasively cheerful music and shimmying puppets; suddenly it whisks the park visitor, a boy who came there with a homemade jet pack hoping to win an inventor's contest, into a utopian future full of Art Deco skyscrapers and monorails, and watches him fall and rise through soupy clouds, courtesy of his flame-spitting invention.
Thus does an actual theme park ride become a high-tech cinematic version of a theme park ride. The first ride is gentle, nostalgic and charming. The second is dazzling and intense—a masterpiece of choreography, editing, design, sound effects and music, plus a bit of chill-inducing dream logic: at one point, the boy falls while his jet pack plummets a few meters to his left, and to reach it, he kicks his arms and legs like a swimmer chasing a life preserver. "Tomorrowland" has many uncanny dream-logic moments like that one. They make the film worth seeing, even though it's better as an experience than as a story or a message, yet wants to be all three at once.

Tomorrowland Watch Movie Online

Tomorrowland

There's a plot of sorts, something about a teenage girl (Britt Robertson's Casey) seeking out a greying scientist (George Clooney's Frank Walker) who knows how to access the aforementioned future, where brilliant scientists and other special individuals have created a pristine new world in advance of this one's death. The boy in the World's Fair sequence, young Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), is befriended by a freckle-faced young English girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) who has a secret that I won't reveal here, except to say that it helps the others wriggle free of seemingly inescapable jams.
There are fuzzy or stilted warnings, courtesy of co-writers Bird and Damon Lindelof ("Star Trek Into Darkness"), about the plight of extraordinary individuals in an ordinary world, and the price we'll eventually pay for despoiling the environment and demonizing science. Bird has been criticized for infusing "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille" with simplistic and sometimes elitist-sounding statements about the privileges that should accrue to gifted people. He'll get raked over the coals again here, thanks to the future's "Atlas Shrugged"-style origin story: the world's great scientific minds decided they'd had enough of ignorance and apathy and made their own world that's part Shangri-La and part Emerald City of Oz, but functionally Noah's Ark.
The plot has a raggedy quality, often leaning on a squad of "Matrix"-like, passing-for-human assassins and composer Michael Giacchino's "Behold the magic!" score to gin up tension. At its worst, it raises basic creative questions that are a far cry from its philosophical and moral concerns: Is the heroine special because she truly has special qualities, or because the "You are the chosen one" thing lets Bird barrel through two hours without having to give Casey any traits besides spunk? Is it a problem, story-wise and message-wise, that Frank's chief antagonist (Hugh Laurie) makes more sense than the heroes who oppose him? Maybe Bird and company would have been better off heeding Frank's advice to Casey: "Must I explain everything to you? Can't you just be impressed and move on?"
But if you treat "Tomorrowland" mainly as an immense cinematic theme park that unveils a new "ride" every few minutes—just as Bird's last feature, "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" was mainly a series of action scenes—its weaker aspects won't be deal-breakers. In this sense, if in no other, Bird's latest owes more to "Metropolis," "Blade Runner," "Dark City," the first "Tron" and other works of top-shelf eye-candy than to most of the SF-and-fantasy-tinged franchise entries that modern studios churn out.
Bird conceives the entire picture as a series of clockwork suspense sequences involving laserguns, plasma bombs, hidden doors and gates and passageways and tunnels, vertigo-inducing climbs and falls, serpentine hover-trains, machines and structures that fold and unfold and split, and humans that might not be human. With the aid of a time-travel device that looks like a souvenir button, present-day panoramas vanish, disclosing landscapes in a "Jetsons" vein. There are jet packs, monorails, robots that clomp and clank, and zero-gravity swimming pools that are just puck-shaped masses of water hanging in midair. There are moments where people exist simultaneously in two time periods while walking, running, falling or driving, and a scene near the end that's so unabashedly sentimental, yet so emotionally complex and confounding, that I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it. 
The film is a personal work of art that seems born of stubborn passion. It's definitely not an assembly-line product, despite the way that some sequences evoke (deliberately, would seem) actual assembly lines. If it's a bit irritating or dull at times, it's because it seems clear that Bird knows why he's showing us these things, and what he hoped to achieve by visualizing them in this manner, but he and his co-writers (including co-scenarist Jeff Jensen) can't find a graceful way to communicate it.
No matter. The "message" of "Metropolis"—a parable of labor and capital which concludes that society needs the heart to mediate between the head and the hands—was a mess, too. Today it seems at once reductive and overreaching, basically Marxism Lite. But if you had to make a list of reasons why that film is still remembered, discussed, and raided for inspiration by films like Bird's, "message" wouldn't be on it. "Metropolis" is remembered because watching it is as close as many of us will get to being able to have another person's dream.

The Green Inferno (2015) Watch Movie Online

Controversial filmmaker Eli Roth ("Hostel," "Cabin Fever") has finally made a film with squirm-inducing skills that match its provocative payload. Roth's homage to notorious Italian films like "Cannibal Holocaust" is a nasty piece of work with a mean spirit that is tempered by believable sympathy with naive protagonist Justine (Lorenza Izzo), a college freshman who travels to Peru with a student activist group after she becomes traumatized by a college lecture on female genital mutilation. Because Roth is an existential misanthrope, Justine faces the worst nightmare of any privileged white protagonist with unexamined racism in their hearts: an inhuman tribe of flesh-eating cannibals who behead, gouge, impale, drug and devour any outsiders unfortunate enough to cross their paths. "The Green Inferno" is, in that sense, not so much a knock against Occupy Wall-Street-style slacktivists (though it is also that) so much as it's an accomplished, mean-spirited horror film about a heroine who is too young to understand the motives for her do-gooder idealism.

The Green Inferno (2015) Watch Online

The Green Inferno (2015)

From the start, Justine is asked—by her even-tempered diplomat father Charles (Richard Burgi) and bitchy romantic rival Kara (Ignacia Allamand)—why she's joining a mission to stop the destruction of an indigenous Peruvian tribe's ancestral home. Justine has immediately superficial reasons: she's attracted to student leader Alejandro (Ariel Levy), a dickishly self-serious leader who initially asks Justine to leave his group when she mockingly raises doubts about his methods' efficacy. Still, Justine makes her way back into Alejandro's good graces in a scene that complicates her horny-for-teacher motives: Justine challenges Alejandro, and says that maybe his group might have a greater impact if he were more inclusive. 
That call to inclusivity is ironic given that this is an Eli Roth film. Roth mocks Justine's peers before circumstantial peril humanizes them (mostly; more on this in a moment). These kids want to smoke weed, they lead with their alternative lifestyle (Veganism is wacky!), and are deeply hormonal. They are, in other words, the perfect examples of the American exceptionalism that Roth mocked in "Hostel," only this time they're too young, dumb and full of bad ideas to be treated like real bad guys. Still, there is an element of you-get-what-you-give moralism to the blood-soaked massacre that ensues after Alejandro's group's plane experiences engine failure and crash-lands in the midst of a people-eating Peruvian tribe.
The violence in these scenes is intense. It's technically not gratuitous however because the extreme nature of Roth's film is its primary reason to exist. Still, with that in mind, it's interesting to see how Roth's fanboyish impulse to top "Cannibal Holocaust" director Ruggero Deodato and his Italian contemporaries winds up inadvertently revealing the relatively humanizing aspects of "The Green Inferno" as a cultural critique. If you buy into Roth's film, these cannibals are the worst nightmare of girls like Justine, a character who stubbornly has to convince herself that she knows what she's doing when she follows her impulse to translate her revulsion with genital mutilation into progressive political action. 
But as with the protagonists of any halfway decent post-"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" horror film, the humanity of Justine's peers kick in along with their survival instinct. They cannot reason with a seemingly uncivilized third world group whose physical appearance—bones through their noses, red dye covering their skin, and loin cloths over their extremities—immediately broadcasts their alien nature. So it stands to reason that violence is extreme, and copious throughout "The Green Inferno." Roth defines his characters based on what he knows they're not: smart or introspective enough to be wise beyond their years, and certainly not emotionally hardy enough to know how their bodies react under extreme stress. So, because selfishness and naiveté are universal constants in Roth's cynical world, the natives of "The Green Inferno" must be lopsidedly sadistic.
"The Green Inferno" is accordingly at its best when it's a horror film that thinks it's a satire, and not a satire that acts like a horror film. There are a couple of notable missteps, particularly in the scene where blonde vegan Amy (Kirby Bliss Blanton) has diarrhea. The scene is presented as an unnerving, even surreal moment in an already unbelievable, intolerable situation. But the sound effects guy was clearly instructed to go to town, and he winds up giving short shrift to one of the film's most believably pathetic characters. Thankfully, while one might wonder what value a horror film that uses savage tribesmen stereotypes, Roth's film does represent anti-heroic Justine and her peers through a lens that is both critical and human enough. "The Green Inferno" is not exactly a feel-good film, but it gets a very particular job done.

The Perfect Guy Watch Movie Online

“This is the part of the movie where you kidnap me and sell my organs, right?” Sanaa Lathan’s character playfully asks Michael Ealy’s on their way to an underground nightclub in “The Perfect Guy.” Nothing nearly so wacky or grotesque goes down in this romantic thriller, but you’ll wish it would.
“The Perfect Guy” is decent trash that could have been delicious trash with a little more daring. Director David M. Rosenthal’s film—which, tellingly, Sony did not screen for critics before opening day—is slick, glossy and sturdily made in a way that’s reminiscent of similar sexy-stalker fare from the 1990s. (It’s vaguely Verhoevenish.) It features gorgeous actors in stylish settings with flattering lighting and fashionable clothing. Los Angeles shimmers in the daytime and glitters at night, and much of the action goes down in Lathan’s serene mid-century modern house in the hills (Silver Lake, probably) with floor-to-ceiling glass, minimalist furnishings and generous use of chunky Austin stone.

The Perfect Guy Watch Online

The Perfect Guys

It’s all very tasteful—too much so, perhaps—which makes the few crazy moments stand out as unintentionally funny rather than cohesive parts of a whole. You keep hoping that an insane Tyler Perry movie will burst free from these understated trappings, but no such luck.
The overqualified, magnetic stars do their best with this tepid material, however. (The script comes from Tyger Williams, whose last screenplay was 1993’s “Menace II Society.” Rosenthal, meanwhile, previously directed the appealing “Janie Jones” and the dreary “A Single Shot.”) Lathan, who’s incapable of finding a dishonest moment on screen, stars as Leah Vaughn, an L.A.-based lobbyist who seems to have it all: brains, looks, power, a gorgeous home and a loving, longtime boyfriend in architect Dave (the ubiquitous Morris Chestnut). After two years together, Leah is ready to get married and start a family; Dave, who’s been surrounded by divorce his whole life, isn’t. So that’s the end of that.
Conveniently, though, she meets cute not once but twice with a super-handsome guy named Carter (Michael Ealy). After sharing a flirty moment at a coffee shop, their paths cross again at a trendy restaurant when Carter swoops in to save Leah from a drunk dude’s unwanted advances at the bar. He really is too good to be true—perfect, even, hence the title. Besides his looks (and his propensity for shirtless, sweaty pushups), Carter is attentive, thoughtful, doting and has a successful career as a high-tech corporate security expert, which will come in handy once he starts making her life a living hell.
Because after the romantic dates, the passionate nightclub bathroom sex (which is, again, tasteful) and the heartwarming road trip to visit her parents in San Francisco (Charles S. Dutton and L. Scott Caldwell), Carter reveals his true nature when he savagely beats a stranger at a gas station for simply speaking to Leah. She is, naturally, disturbed and afraid. She pulls away like any strong, sane person would. This only makes Carter want her more, which he demonstrates by calling and texting her incessantly, breaking into her house, hiding surveillance equipment, hacking into her computer, stealing her cat and pushing her elderly across-the-street neighbor down a flight of stairs when she becomes suspicious of his antics.
There’s no tension or even real fear in his transformation because it happens so quickly. There’s no arc to his personality: He goes from suave to psycho in the blink of an eye. Leah herself says it best when she confides in a girlfriend that it’s as if a switch had been flipped, and it renders his character more of an idea of a threat than a legitimate one. The moment when he sneaks into her bathroom and puts her toothbrush in his mouth just to experience the sensation of being near her should be deeply creepy, but it drew giggles at a late-night showing.
Ealy at least gets more to do here than Chestnut, whose main function is to return in the third act to stoically, heroically protect the woman he conveniently decides he loves again. His character is emblematic of what’s wrong with the entire movie, come to think of it: He looks great but there’s not much to him beneath the surface.

A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story Watch Online

When Lizzie Velasquez was in high school, she found a video about herself on YouTube titled: "The World’s Ugliest Woman.” Featuring footage of Velasquez—who, at that point, had an undiagnosed syndrome that gave her striking facial features and difficulty gaining weight—it drew over 4 million views and prompted hundreds of cruel comments.
Velasquez read every single harsh word and took them all to heart—then she tossed them right back. Rather than letting this devastating discovery define or destroy her, she seized this same method of communication and used it to spread positivity and empowerment.

A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story Watch Online

A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story

The documentary “A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story” follows the Austin, Texas native’s journey from insecure, bullied kid to internationally acclaimed motivational speaker and lobbyist. Her story would be inspiring in and of itself, but Velasquez is such an effervescent, charismatic subject, she can’t help but win your affection as well as your respect.
Director-producer Sara Hirsh Bordo was clearly wowed, as well; her first feature is an unabashed love letter to this young woman that rarely dares to dig too far below the surface. She presents very little in the way of drama, suspense or forward momentum; Bordo’s documentary is extremely straightforward and doesn’t attempt anything ambitious artistically. Still, Velasquez is abidingly pleasant company for the film’s brief running time—and the purity of her message is undeniable.
“A Brave Heart” allows Velasquez, now 26, to reflect on the difficult childhood she endured because of her unusual appearance. At the film’s start, she wanders the campus of her old elementary school and gets teary-eyed at the memory of hiding from staring kids in kindergarten: “I would look at everyone and just wish I could be them,” she recalls. “And to just think that 20 years later, the world knows who I am, and it’s for something good.”
But Velasquez manages to laugh and smile while glancing through a stack of her baby pictures: “I had a giant forehead, and I still do.” She’s also sanguine in discussing the myriad tests, scans, surgeries and reconstructions she’s endured throughout her life. That’s what’s so disarming about Velasquez throughout the film—no matter what’s happening, she radiates sweetness, humor and decency to her core.
But her upbeat nature was severely tested at age 17 when she found the “ugliest woman” video on YouTube. (Let this be a lesson to all of us: Do NOT read the comment section. Ever. And if you do read the comments, don’t give them any weight, positively or negatively.) Still, clever woman that she is, Velasquez started her own YouTube channel in response. She figured out how to use the immediate, worldwide access of the Internet to promote kindness and self-esteem, and she now has over 450,000 subscribers. The 2013 TEDx talk she gave in Austin has nearly 9.6 million views. Toward the film’s conclusion, she steps out on stage to a standing ovation before a crowd of 10,000 in Mexico City (but first, she has a thoroughly awkward meet-and-greet backstage with Hillary Clinton, which leaves her giddy).
Which brings us to Velasquez’s journey to Washington to lobby on behalf of the Safe Schools Improvement Act, which aims to legislate bullying. (The bill still has not passed.) Her partner in this effort is Tina Meier, whose daughter, Megan, hung herself shortly before her 14^th birthday in 2006 after suffering cyber cruelty. While this section feels like its own separate, tangential film, it does allow us a couple of glimpses of Velasquez when she’s feeling less than perky.
In one instance, she and Meier discuss the pressures of serving as an inspiring figure for others all the time and feeling reluctant to surrender to moments of weakness. In the other, Velasquez becomes ill on the day she’s scheduled to visit various members of Congress. She goes to the bathroom and throws up, but powers through with her usual poise.
“A Brave Heart” could have used more of such unguarded moments; as it stands now, it’s a worthwhile film that could have been a powerful film if it had gone beyond the skin-deep.

The Intern Watch Online

There’s something really soothing about a Nancy Meyers movie. Everything looks so good; both polished and cozy. It’s not just the real estate porn, which had its most blatant manifestation in the Hamptons beach house featured in Meyers’ ageism-juggling 2003 rom-com “Something’s Gotta Give.” It’s also the furnishings, like the rotating tie rack in the bedroom of the brownstone owned by Robert De Niro’s retired businessman in her latest, "The Intern." It’s how all the surfaces gleam: “The Intern” was shot at locations mostly within walking distance of where I actually live, and while it is a very blessed part of Brooklyn, its windows are not normally quite as uniformly shiny as those of the buildings seen here.

 The Intern Watch Online

The Intern

And often this soothing quality serves as a distraction from how inane and uncomfortable a movie such as “Something’s Gotta Give” can be. But here’s the thing: “The Intern,” while having its share of silly moments, is the most genuinely enjoyable and likable movie that Meyers—a longtime writer and producer before taking up directing—has put her name to since, oh, I don’t know, 1984’s “Irreconcilable Differences.”
De Niro has the title role here, as he did in “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” and even “The King of Comedy.” His character’s name is Ben Whittaker, and he’s a retired, well-off widower in Brooklyn who’s bored with the relative inactivity of his current, pleasant mode of living. So he applies for a position in a “Senior Intern Program” at an e-commerce concern called “About The Fit,” and winds up reporting to its founder, Jules, an exemplary, for Meyers, 21^st Century entrepreneur type; not too far beneath her sunny exterior—she IS played by Anne Hathaway, after all—is a highly driven and possibly blinkered go-getter.
De Niro’s character here is one that he pretty much never played during what many consider his acting heyday: a decent, straightforward, non-neurotic regular guy who’s gotten somewhere good in life. And in this movie, he plays it rather well. There’s something slightly Woody Allenesque about his opening scene, in which he constructs a job-application video. His role calls for him to do a certain amount of mugging as he interacts with younger colleagues and learns about the Weird Things These Kids Today Do With Their Relationships And The Internet and such. Thankfully, the movie doesn’t dwell on senior-citizen bemusement with the Digital Age all too much; one of the points of De Niro’s character is that he’s alert and competent and wants to be of service. He has a hard time being of service to Jules, whose relentless focus makes her immediately distrustful of anyone who has an insight as to how she conceives and runs her business. And the movie is rather good at the details of that business, and the way that Jules’ vision for it defines its practical particulars.
But Ben manages to get into Jules’ good graces partly via patriarchal stealth, as when he confronts Jules’ driver after seeing him take a few nips out of a paper bag right before the soon-to-be-ex-employee is supposed to take her to a meeting in Manhattan. Ben’s internship happens to coincide with a challenging period in the growth of Jules’ company; Jules’ aide-de-camp Cameron (a very understated Andrew Rannells) brings her the unusual news that the company’s investors, while delighted with its success, would like to bring an outside CEO to the company. Jules dutifully interviews prospects even as she’s dizzied by the idea that she could be effectively ousted from her own creation. In the meantime, her home life—she has a too-milquetoasty-to-be-a-bro-dad husband (Anders Holm) and a predictably delightful and adorable young daughter (JoJo Kushner)—is taking the standard can-a-career-woman-have-it-all hits. And at least one hit that’s not so standard, or maybe I should say, not so easy to stand.
Through all of this Ben maintains a careful, empathetic watch—early in their relationship, Jules pinpoints her discomfort with him as arising because he’s too “observant”—and when he steps in to offer help, he does so in a discreetly chivalrous way that actually runs counter to any “here comes daddy to save the day” expectations. Ben, as it happens, genuinely admires Jules—looks up to her, you might say—and when he does bring his experience as a businessman to bear on Jules’ own enterprise, it’s in the spirit of sharing knowledge rather than that of correction. When push comes to shove, Ben offers Jules the assurance that the thing to do is be tough and go after what you want.
The adages of “The Intern” are delivered in a comedy package that, for the most part, is sane, sweet, and smart, and a lot of the time, actually funny. A budding romance between Ben and the company’s in-house masseuse (Rene Russo) is fodder for two groan-inducing visual gags. But a silly set piece in which Ben enlists some of the younger goofballs of About The Fit on a housebreaking mission, replete with latter-day “Ocean’s Eleven” references, is actually a tolerable bit of rompage. And everyone in the cast, including Hathaway, who, for the record, I have never not liked, is extremely appealing. “What have you done with my husband?” my wife asked me the other night when I came home and told her I’d had a genuinely good time watching a Nancy Meyers movie. What could I say? You’re never too old to keep an open mind.