Stan Carp Movies

The uncomfortable merger of art and commerce leads to an unstable romantic triangle in this satiric comedy from director Jonathan Parker. Madeleine (Marley Shelton) is a beautiful young woman who runs an upscale art gallery in New York City. While Madeleine prides herself on exhibiting the most daring and cutting-edge work on the East Coast, her dirty little secret is that she's able to keep the place open by selling the bland but accessible work of her boyfriend (Eion Bailey), whose paintings are quite popular with corporate clients. However, Madeleine is drawn to moody creative types, and her boyfriend makes the mistake of introducing her to his bother (Adam Goldberg), an avant-garde composer whose music is built around breaking glass and the clatter of metal objects. Before long, Madeleine has fallen for the pretentious composer and has to choose between him and the man who can keep her gallery in the black. Also starring Vinnie Jones and Zak Orth, (Untitled) received its world premiere at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Todd Field teams with novelist Tom Perrotta to adapt Perrotta's acclaimed novel concerning the suburban malaise experienced by a handful of small-town individuals whose intersecting lives converge in a variety of surprising, and sometimes ominous, ways. Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, and Patrick Wilson star in a cinematic adaptation that doesn't aim so much to simply reproduce the book for the screen as it does to re-imagine the written word by exploring new possibilities for the characters and situations originally presented in Perrotta's 2004 best-seller. Sarah (Winslet) is a suburban outsider who, unlike the other playground moms, isn't afraid to approach the dreamy but long-absent father whom smitten housewives have taken to calling the "Prom King." Long days at the local community pool with their respective children soon find Sarah becoming acquainted with local husband and father Brad (Patrick Wilson) -- who seems to share in her seething discontentment with life in their quaint commuter town. An English literature major who never envisioned a fate as a soccer mom, Sarah has a growing dissatisfaction with her successful husband (Gregg Edelman) that parallels Brad's increasing frustration with his inability to pass the bar and connect with his wife, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), a successful documentary filmmaker. It's not long before the dejected pair is meeting for a series of illicit afternoon trysts as their unsuspecting spouses work and their children lie quietly napping. Meanwhile, after the community is riled by the return of a convicted sex offender (Jackie Earle Haley) who leaves the concerned parents scrambling to protect their young ones, an attempt made by Sarah and Brad to legitimize their clandestine relationship by dining together with their respective spouses begins to awaken Kathy's suspicions about the fidelity of her husband. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

The most recent victims of an apparent serial killer are a woman who worked with underprivileged children and a sportscaster. Upon investigating the background of one of the victims, it is discovered that a fondness for kinky sex may have been the motivation for the murder. The captured killer tries to get off on the "Kojak" defense, claiming that his mind was "twisted" by watching too much television. The strategy used by McCoy (Sam Waterston) to attack this argument could well have been Law & Order producer Dick Wolf's own personal response to those who think that purging TV of violence is the solution to violence in real life. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide