Choke

Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has got some problems -- when he's not at Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings hunting for women to bed, he masquerades as a choking victim in restaurants as a scheme to gather money from unsuspecting strangers, which he uses to keep his ailing mother (Anjelica Huston) in a ...more

Is it just me, or have the weather-beaten "Lonely Men" of '70s cinema morphed into equally isolated, yet significantly more pathetic versions of their predecessors? Once there was Travis Bickle, now we have Andrew Largeman. Today's prevalent male stock character is young and forlorn, and so socially awkward that dating is a painful, otherwise absent part of their life. Their angel-in-the-wings is always waiting, though, a woman so sweet and clumsy herself that together they make for a pair of ...more

It should probably be noted up front that Choke is not a movie for the squeamish, the faint of heart, the easily embarrassed, or virtually anyone who isn't game for watching modern life's ugliest and most sexually explicit truths projected unapologetically onscreen. But then, a viewer with such an uncomfortably modest predisposition should probably know better than to sit down and watch a movie like Choke in the first place. For the rest of us, the nastiness only adds to the appeal. First of ...more