3 Movies

[lsanderson]

The Weird Sisters Prophesy Blood From a Dance Floor
By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

For four centuries William Shakespeare’s plays have been reinvented to fit contemporary sensibilities. But few recent efforts can match the Australian writer and director Geoffrey Wright’s brutal and thrilling new version, which envisions the thane of Cawdor as a longhaired, drug-addled gangster and his poisoned realm as a decadent MTV dreamscape of nymphet witches, smoky nightclubs and point-blank, slow-motion gun battles. More

He’s a Very Good Pianist, but He’s a Very Bad Boy
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

Uneasily straddling age groups and genres, “Joshua” is a highly effective family drama cloaked in the stale tropes of the demon-seed thriller. This could be a brilliant marketing strategy (two demographics for the price of one) or the accidental consequence of trusting a generic idea to an unusually thoughtful and restrained director (George Ratliff, who also wrote the script, with David Gilbert). Either way, there is so much on screen to enjoy that the movie’s endgame flight into excess is disappointing but not disastrous. More

Big Teenage Dreams, Small-Town Doldrums
By MANOHLA DARGIS

The teenagers in “Colma: The Musical” don’t really burst into song, uvulas violently quivering and fists grasping for fame. For the most part they just slide into the music and lyrics as if slipping into the comfort of bed, far from the world and its racket. An itty-bitty movie with a great big heart, “Colma” is about three young people on the brink of that terrifying adventure called life, but it’s also about how we learn to give voice — joyfully, honestly, loudly — to the truest parts of ourselves, parts not everyone else hears. More

Bonus:


Fights With a Bang
By RACHEL SALTZ

“Dynamite Warrior,” a Thai martial arts film, starts with a bang, which is to say a fight: It’s fast, colorful, well choreographed and, when the masked hero surfs through the air on a homemade rocket, giddy and odd. More