Martin Scorsese continues to suffer from a form of elephantiasis, compounded by a touch of Oscaritis: a pushing-three-hours epic on the tumultuous career of Howard Hughes (the eternally boyish Leonardo DiCaprio, deficient in gravitas even with the added mustache midway through) in the parallel worlds of filmmaking and aeronautics circa …
Communication problems the world over. An American tourist is struck by rifle fire in Morocco, arousing erroneous worries of terrorism. An illegal-alien nanny drags along the two towheads in her care to a Mexican wedding, and runs afoul of the Border Patrol on their return. And a horny pantyless deaf-mute …
A crime-does-pay comedy, told in flashback, following the transparent bluff that the two bank robbers known as the Sleepover Bandits (Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton) have now been shot dead. Their getaway driver's sideline as a would-be Hollywood stuntman provides a dead giveaway to the "surprise" ending. Mid-spree, they pick …
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen wrote a zingy throwaway line ridiculing a saliva dribbling, shopping bag-schlepping lunatic who wanders screaming into a cafeteria. We mock the things we are to be. Thirty-six years (and just as many films) later finds him crafting an entire feature around a more upscale version …
The easy descriptors for Todd Haynes's take on Patricia Highsmith’s tale of socially unacceptable female relationships during the early ’50s are words like “sumptuous,” “ravishing,” and maybe “entrancing” (that last thanks to a command performance from Cate Blanchett as a failed wife, loving mother, and motherly lover). But the more …
The title is colorless on purpose. But by the end -- and quite precisely in the meaningful curtain line -- it acquires a richness of shade and tint. The heroine will by then, in the common phrase, have shown her true colors. An old-fashioned, grandly romantic WWII espionage thriller (vaguely …
Disney's live-action version of the Grimm fairy tale about humble endurance and the joys of ball-going isn't perfect. (For one thing, Helena Bonham Carter's Fairy Godmother is slapsticky and silly in a way befitting wicked stepsisters and no one else. For another, some of the personal and political machinations are …
A collection of eleven comic sketches filmed over a period of almost two decades by Jim Jarmusch, all of them involving, if not actually revolving around, coffee and cigarettes (or in one case, tea and cigarettes) and the various restaurant tables on which these are arrayed. Each takes place in …
Dustin Hoffman said it in Stranger than Fiction: if you’re in a tragedy, you die; if you’re in a comedy, you get married. Viewers will have to decide for themselves exactly what sort of story they are getting from director and co-writer Pawel Pawlikowski’s handsome, gorgeous, heartbreaking, heart-thumping romance. Handsome: …
The central conceit, and little else, has been retained from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name: a protagonist who ages in reverse. (The story of course was written and titled before the soundalike name of Benjamin Britten came to fame, and as long as they were …
This big-screen adaptation of Herman Koch’s Dutch novel was originally scheduled to be Cate Blanchett’s directorial debut. Instead, the job went to screenwriter Owen Moverman, and we’re left to wonder what if. A pair of privileged cousins film the murder of a homeless woman whom they decide to torch pretty …
Historical costume drama, stronger on the costumes than on the history or drama. Those two elements come down to a kind of Late Renaissance Godfather, in which a feminist-revisionist Elizabeth I is installed in the part of Michael Corleone, evolving from a frolicsome carefree girl (no virgin, she) into a …
Cate Blanchett, or a bloodless marmoreal likeness of her, resumes her role from the nine-years-earlier Elizabeth, under the same director, Shekhar Kapur, for a collection of the Virgin Queen's greatest hits: Mary, Queen of Scots; Sir Walter Raleigh; and, in a madly cross-cutting climax, the Spanish Armada, dispatched by the …
True-life unsolved mystery, set in the early ‘30s, about a young German doctor and his mistress who turned their backs on civilization to find the meaning of life on an uninhabited island. But his writing draws attention to their remote corner of the globe, and before long, paradise becomes the …
It gives, first of all, a hefty central role to the deserving and appreciative but not effusive Cate Blanchett -- that of a widowed backwater Georgia fortune-teller ("I don't call myself that") with three young boys -- and it gives vivid and well-differentiated surrounding roles to the varyingly worthy Giovanni …