Socially conscious monstrosity on the stitched-together topics of violence in America, tabloid television, and the cult of celebrity. A couple of new-generation American Dreamers ("You think I came to America to work?"), a Russian and a Czech whose feverish sweat and shifting glances unaccountably fail to set off any alarms …
A "lost" or anyhow neglected Frank Capra film from the same year as It Happened One Night. (A Columbia film re-released, perversely enough, by Paramount!) All the old gang is reassembled -- scriptwriter Robert Riskin, photographer Joseph Walker -- and Warner Baxter is a more soulful, more careworn, more human …
Comedy without laughs. "Satire" might be the optimistically preferred word of the director, co-writer, and star, Warren Beatty, and he might want to add, for commercial as well as critical purposes, the immediate qualifier of "Capra-esque." (The presence of the name Frank Capra III in both the opening and the …
A recasting of The Prisoner of Zenda or The Prince and the Pauper or State Secret (or others) as a post-Perot piece of sentimental populism about a Presidential look-alike who's installed in the Oval Office by Machiavellian wire-pullers when the real President is laid low by a stroke. (Overexertion with …
Adequate biographical data (narrated by Ron Howard), generous film clips (of uneven print quality), and perhaps overgenerous eulogies (from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, John Milius, and Robert Altman), in celebration of the centennial of Capra's birth. Written and directed by Kenneth Bowser.
You do not have to be a great admirer of a film director in order to take an interest in a film about him. But a shared admiration will be a great help in getting you through those stretches of hot air, whitewash, looking the other way, putting the best …
The impact of global warming is the subject of yet another series of talking-head testimonials and finger-wagging rebukes aimed at those deep in “climate denial.” As if Al Gore’s conveniently filmed Learning Annex lecture wasn’t enough, documentarian Craig Scott Rosebraugh dredges up one more bucket of cold water to throw …
Though this is as different from previous Coen brothers movies as all of those are different from each other, it nonetheless picks up the interest of Barton Fink in the issues of commercialism, success, popularity -- the whole American, and particularly Hollywooden, ethos. That earlier movie confused a lot of …
A big time political strategist (Steve Carell), still stinging from Mrs. Clinton’s loss, spends the summer in South Carolina, helping to turn a retired veteran (Chris Cooper) into the Democratic mayor of a small conservative town. If you’re determined to pattern a Red State/Blue State variation on Frank Capra, there …
A pampered heiress jumps her father's yacht on the eve of her wedding, and sets off on a very educational tour of grassroots America, learning empirically about the art of hitchhiking, haystack-sleeping, donut-dunking and so forth, with a wiseguy newspaperman serving as her gruff guide to Real Life and True …
If the Grinch in you has difficulty getting past the saccharine silliness of Miracle on 34th Street, how about a Christmas film that opens with an alcoholic druggist bringing his fist so hard against his delivery boy’s head that blood flows from the lad’s ear? And for a beloved yuletide …
If the Grinch in you has difficulty getting past the saccharine silliness of Miracle on 34th Street, how about a Christmas film that opens with an alcoholic druggist bringing his fist so hard against his delivery boy’s head that blood flows from the lad’s ear? And for a beloved yuletide …
The sequel follows our pretty-in-pink Harvard Law grad to our nation's capital (or Capitol) as a legislative aide with a personal agenda: to outlaw animal testing in the cosmetics industry and simultaneously to free the mother of her pet Chihuahua, Bruiser, in time for her nuptials. (Wishful point of reference: …
A smarty-pants comedy that outsmarts itself. It tells of your basic disgruntled ex-employee who storms the boss's office with a gun (ha-ha) to demand his job back, but who comes away instead with the boss's daughter as a hostage and without actually killing anyone. The bigger joke (ha-ha-ha) is, or …
Steven Brill's update of the Depression-period Capra-Cooper antique, populism and preachiness intact, is an above-average Adam Sandler comedy, about a sweet-natured rube who inherits a bundle. (Forty billion, for inflation.) The average is raised in large part by the rest of the batting order, Peter Gallagher, Erick Avari (the one …