If the Nazis had invented Twitter, we wouldn’t have found ourselves in the titular predicament. After news that their only son was killed in battle, a German factory mechanic (Brendan Gleeson) and his wife (Emma Thompson) mount a grassroots campaign to take down the Third Reich, one epistle at a …
As the sun fades on the Twilight series, Hollywood sets its sights on another stretch of successful teen Harlequin Romances. Gatlin, South Carolina is the type of place people can leave only after they die. A group of "casters" (don’t call them witches) transform the town and an otherwise handsomely …
With another wild-haired royal at the helm (and only one-tenth of Tangled’s wit, charm, and stereoscopic invention), Pixar’s latest amounts to little more than Rapunzel redux. What begins as a standard Disney fairy princess outing takes a turn for the better halfway through, when a magic spell converts one of …
The Evelyn Waugh novel revisited, at roughly a fourth the length of the early-Eighties TV miniseries. Matthew Goode, as the self-professed atheist artist Charles Ryder, murmurs his way through the pages of a radical rewrite (particularly the gay abandon): first year at Oxford, the tormented Catholics of Brideshead manor, Venice, …
More literary stargazing by writer and first-time director Christopher Hampton, much preferable to the almost concurrent Total Eclipse, on which he was writer only. No doubt it helps that he's back on his native soil, turning his gaze to the homosexual Bloomsbury belletrist, Lytton Strachey. His ear for high-toned Wildean …
A haughty fashion designer (Emma Thompson) and the seamstress most likely to dethrone her (Emma Stone) wage battle in this, the third live-action attempt on the part of the studio to ransack the Disney Vault, cancel originality, and in doing so, defile a classic. And what could be crueler than …
Kenneth Branagh's second directorial effort makes his first one, Henry V, look downright modest. Any filmmaker (it bears repeating) will require no more taste or knowledge than the average high-school sophomore to think to impress somebody by aligning himself with Shakespeare. To attempt additionally to replicate the three-hatted juggling act …
A precocious English schoolgirl of 1961 (a cellist, a Francophile, a devotee of the Pre-Raphaelites, a sneaky smoker for sophistication), on track for Oxford, gets rerouted by a shady older man who shows her the finer things of life: a Ravel concert, a Christie's auction, nightclubs, Paris. The foreseeable end …
Emma Thompson picks up her Victorian-era pen to take on the based-on-a-true story of John Ruskin (Greg Wise), a certain sort of aesthete — you know, the kind that might fall in love with an innocent girl, only to find himself horrified by her eventual womanhood and its dirty, dirty …
In the fresh footprints of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, another Jane Austen adaptation. And in a word, it "delivers," in every bit as predictable a way as a Schwarzenegger action thriller. Or in a few other words, it meets but never exceeds expectations -- with the solitary exception of …
Two-time Academy Award winner Emma Thompson embodies the candor and apprehension of retired teacher Nancy Stokes, and newcomer Daryl McCormack personifies the charisma and compassion of sex worker Leo Grande. As Nancy embarks on a post-marital sexual awakening and Leo draws on his skills and charm, together they find a …
Or for short, Pot III. It has a new director — Alfonso Cuarón, of A Little Princess and, less pertinently, Y Tu Mamá También — and a new Dumbledore — Michael Gambon, in place of the late Richard Harris — in addition to new roles for the likes of Gary …
The 28-year-old British Wunderkind Kenneth Branagh has dared to attempt to replicate Olivier's feat — his triple feat — of adapting, directing, and starring in a screen treatment of Part III of Shakespeare's "Prince Hal" trilogy, and has additionally dared to give it a completely new slant without doing undue …
Director James Ivory's -- and producer Ismail Merchant's -- and scriptwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's -- third try at E.M. Forster, after their Room with a View and their Maurice. The third time's the charm. The diminished satirical element as compared, say, to Room with a View, and diminished comical element, …
The third screen treatment of Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic vampire tale is the first to retain the original title (cf. The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man), and the first to bring to it the total commitment of top dollar, most helpful in creating a weed-overgrown New York City. …