Hardly a movie at all, more like a glossy picture-book supplement to Frank McCourt's best-selling memoir of growing up poor in Ireland. McCourt's prose has accordingly been whittled down to excerpted captions in service to the lavish illustrations. And very arty illustrations they are, too, predominantly in grim parsimonious gray-green …
Filmed version of the popular Young Adult novel about a pretty blonde orphan girl (a cherubic Sophie Nelisse) who gets taken in by poor, decent German folk just as World War II gets underway. Papa (a hunched Geoffrey Rush) hides a Jew in the basement because the Jew's father once …
One hundred and fifty-nine minutes are a very long sit when it takes only one or two to turn against a movie. The floating, bobbing, yawing camera, intermittently going woozily out of focus, is as immediately irritating as the one in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. And the mud-in-your-eye monochrome …
Off the same wall as Being John Malkovich. Paul Giamatti, being Paul Giamatti, is feeling the burden of his soul in the course of rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya, unable to locate the requisite lightness of touch. At the suggestion of his agent, the dyspeptic actor tries …
Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
In a windswept fishing village, a mother is torn between protecting her beloved son and her own sense of right and wrong. A lie she tells for him rips apart their family and close-knit community in this tense, sweepingly emotional epic. From filmmakers Saela Davis & Anna Rose Holmer and …
From Robert Altman, a pleasant if overlong divertissement that combines the British class-conscious social satire with the dark-and-stormy-night murder mystery: Evelyn Waugh meets Agatha Christie. In short, Altman hell: etiquette, decorum, hierarchy on the one side, and convention, formula, artifice on the other. However much the director might distance himself …
The screen biography of celebrated cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, dead of multiple sclerosis at age forty-two, has been a bit battered on musical grounds over the fact that it had to make do on the soundtrack with a cellist other than Jacqueline Du Pré, and make do on screen with …
Balky adaptation of a Nabokov novel, set in Italy entre les guerres, about an antisocial chess master whose head is turned by a pretty socialite on the eve of the World Championship. John Turturro seems just the right man for the job, had he been given anything to work with. …
First directing job for Chris Noonan in the eleven years since Babe, an innocuous biopic on the author and illustrator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, not to mention proto-feminist and proto-environmentalist, who braved the disparagement of gray-souled publishers ("Bunnies in jackets with brass buttons? However do you imagine such …
The second feature from Lynne Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher attracted some puzzlingly rapturous reviews. For that matter, so has this one, the title of which -- the name of the Scottish heroine, not some untranslated snatch of Norwegian -- is off-putting for different reasons. The film might, or might not, sound …
Emily Watson, in her best work in years, plays the English social worker Margaret Humphreys, whose dutiful life suddenly became a crusade when the case of a woman sent in childhood to Australia leads Humphreys to find the awful truth: 130,000 unwanted (often stigmatized as “illegitimate”) kids dispatched Down Under …