With “Fear the Night,” LaBute clearly aims to push viewers’ buttons, especially using the oft-repeated threat of sexual violence. Some dramatic irony mildly re-casts the movie’s otherwise formulaic conflict in a harsher light, but not much gets complicated by this extra knowledge, especially not LaBute’s tin-eared dialogue nor his indifferent direction. In theory, Tess and

AR: I think the best comedy is born out of reality, and there is a lot of reality in the movie in the sense that everyone has had a really, really bad night. This might be the worst night that you ever had, but it was never played for comedy. It was played for realism

Remi’s feelings about making a zombie movie are quickly sublimated into the process of making a zombie movie. He paces up and down naturally lit hallways and staircases, either fills in or delegates last-minute problem-solving, and generally tries to keep everybody happy. He especially wants to please his wife and daughter Romy (Simone Hazanavicius, the

They end up at a small, rustic inn. Happy wherever she is, Magalie dances joyfully on the patio (and on a tabletop), where the other guests are having dinner. In a very sweet moment, as Blandine watches, she sees Magalie not as she is now but as she was when they were friends, imagining dancing

From there, we meet the couple who are the story’s focus. They have left their young children in the States, and we slowly realize their marriage has collapsed. The idea of a failing couple in peril far from home is intriguing—it makes one imagine a hybrid of Ingmar Bergman and “Deliverance.” But the script fails

At the ripe age of 12, award-winning writer and aspiring filmmaker Bates announced that he wanted to be “the Black Peter Jennings.” This followed his earlier desire to be an astronaut and a cowboy. He’s sat through SpaceCamp, more times than he cares to share, and thanks to his tenure as a boy scout, has

Devine’s character, Owen Browning, is a bank manager, despite being so cloddish and lacking in judgment or impulse control that it’s hard to imagine him being trusted to take a bag of garbage to the curb. His fiancee Parker (Nina Dobrev), is a yoga instructor everyone in Owen’s family inexplicably thinks is a stripper. She’s pleasant and conventionally

“Biosphere” has a curious premise that’s briskly unpacked within the movie’s first half hour. [SOME ESSENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW] In that time, insecure Billy (Duplass) and overweening Ray (Brown) discover that they’re not only trapped in a biodome that is running out of food but also that one of the fish that they’re raising for their own

Perhaps the greatest surprise in his career was his Oscar-nominated turn as John Singer, a deaf mute in the 1968 adaptation of Carson McCullers’s “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” Arkin has no dialogue in the film. His performance is built on glances and gestures; as such, he wears all his emotions on his face

“The Passengers of the Night” takes place from 1981—with jubilation in the streets over the election of President François Mitterrand—through 1988. But a constant throughout the movie’s many life changes is the presence of the late-night radio show that gives the film its title. During the wee hours, people call in to share intimate, personal