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 …
To hell and back with a teenage heroin hero: an uncomfortable contemporary transplant of the Jim Carroll autobiographical cult novel. (Can we look at shared needles in the Nineties without thoughts of AIDS?) It does not avoid the danger of so many junkie war stories, of sounding as much like …
Present-day parable of Paradise Found and Paradise Lost: more precisely, a legendary island Shangri-La somewhere near Thailand (from the air it looks like Never-Never Land in Disney's Peter Pan, meaning, among other things, that it looks painted instead of photographed), home to a Hippie Commune cum Club Med, as well …
Serviceable action-adventure despite frequent interruptions for sermonettes on human rights and capitalist wrongs. The ripped-from-the-headlines story (yesterday's headlines: civil war in Sierra Leone, 1999) features the stock figures of a self-interested soldier of fortune, in league with slaughterous rebels and unscrupulous jewellers, an engagé foreign correspondent, and a hapless native …
The war on terrorism, or anyway a single battle against terrorism, conducted with slickness and razzmatazz, and time for romance too. Leonardo DiCaprio continues to breathe hard in his efforts to be an action hero; the steel-haired Russell Crowe, in a desk job, plays peekaboo around his glasses frames; both …
Lightweight Spielberg (as compared, say, with the immediately preceding Minority Report, never mind Schindler's List or Amistad), an admiring, even envying portrait of a real-life teenage imposter and check forger in the late 1960s, Frank Abagnale, Jr. His excuse: his father's financial woes, his move to a new school, his …
Negligible Woody Allen effort. The fact that Allen the actor is nowhere in the cast is no doubt part of the problem, but chiefly because his substitute, Kenneth Branagh, is a problem unto himself. (The Purple Rose of Cairo managed to become one of Allen's best films without his on-screen …
Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
Quentin Tarantino fails to do for slave owners what he did for Nazis in this, his long-awaited western (southern?) follow-up to the epic war comedy Inglourious Basterds. Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz returns to the Tarantino fold as Dr. King, a German dentist-cum-bounty hunter hot on the trail of a pair of …
Martin Scorsese's long-delayed, and just plain long, survey of Irish gangs in lower Manhattan during the time of the Civil War, Boss Tweed, and all that, beginning and ending in major blood baths, with minor blood rinses and sloshes in between. (It's not hard to see why the internecine discord …
Director Baz Luhrmann finds a suitable subject for the riotous excess of his directorial style in the riotous excess of the Jazz Age. By the time the onscreen parties lurch to a halt, you may feel a little buzzed yourself. Unfortunately, there's still rather a lot of movie remaining at …
A major snow job from fair-haired filmmaker Christopher Nolan, nominally a science-fiction thriller focussed on some sort of psychic superspy (Leonardo DiCaprio, fully earning the furrow between his brows), an expert in the gentle art of “extraction,” the stealing of conscious ideas from people when their guard is down in …
Under the stone-slab “classical” direction of Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio dutifully plays J. Edgar Hoover as an anal-retentive power freak and mama’s boy (Judi Dench is mom). Building the FBI, he strikes fierce poses but remains a weak, petty neurotic. Writer Dustin Lance Black (Milk) never digs very far, and …
At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting …