Steve Dietl/Bleecker Street
MOVIE REVIEW
Elvis & Nixon (2016)
Extrapolating entirely from a photo of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley shaking hands in the Oval Office, “Elvis & Nixon” reimagines the events leading up to the curious meeting between the king of rock and roll (Michael Shannon) and the disgraced former president (Kevin Spacey). Suffice it to say, there’s less value to the history lesson on offer here than, say, the one from “Frost/Nixon.”
Eduardo Moreno/Open Road Films
MOVIE REVIEW
The Green Inferno (2014)
Eli Roth’s latest think piece on international relations is a gleefully nasty culture clash between youthful Western arrogance and a simple tribal lifestyle, somewhere down a crazy river. In “The Green Inferno” a group of handsome white-bread students — naive dim bulbs to a man and led by an out-and-out creep — set about protesting against rain-forest deforestation in the Amazon, and end up on the receiving end of a cannibal holocaust. At first it’s all high-fives and banter and chaining themselves to bulldozers; but then later there’s running and screaming and explosive diarrhea.
MOVIE REVIEW
Putty Hill (2011)
Andrew Laumann/Cinema Guild
Detroit is a city where people searching for work have abandoned whole neighborhoods. New Orleans is still in the process of rebuilding after Katrina. But it's Baltimore that has become the emblem of the problems facing America's working class. HBO's "The Wire" spent five seasons showing the nuances of the city and its war on drugs to a transfixed international audience. And now "Putty Hill," a small independent movie, shows what drugs have done to the white working-class sections of Baltimore as well.