Smooth, smug, half-smart. That description doesn't just fit Michael Douglas in the title role, but the movie as a whole, a retro romantic comedy that engineers a meet-cute (and a continuing date-cute) between the Democratic widower in the Oval Office and a married-to-career hatchet woman for an environmental lobby. ("I …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
Terry Malick's re-examination of the Charles Starkweather case is conducted under antiseptic laboratory conditions. A homicidal maniac, who does an uncanny James Dean impression in T-shirt and cowboy boots, and his baton-twirler girlfriend, take flight, cross-country; but they find themselves continually penned into arty, desolate compositions and saddled with inane …
Incomer Michael Pearce’s crude-around-the-edges approach to writing and editing is a perfect fit for this tale of a disturbed young woman (Jessie Buckley) who is slowly being sucked under by the toxic quicksand of her relationship with Mom. She finds comfort in the arms of a drifter (Johnny Flynn), who …
Occultist moonshine, centered around the imported-from-Cuba underground religion of santeria. There is an authentic element of anthropology and cultural relativism ("Name me one religion in which atrocities have not been committed in the name of God"), and more than the usual dosage of psychology, human interest, and "fine acting." That …
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 …
An expatriate Irish playwright hashes things over with the ghost of his father -- literally, and in stiltedly literary language: "You spent your life sitting on brambles, and wouldn't move for fear someone would take your seat," etc. He also gets to have a generation-gap spat with "himself" -- though …
Curiously cold occult thriller -- and not because of its wintry setting, which is an actual asset. "Curiously," because there is adequate attention paid to the peculiar burdens of clairvoyance, beginning with the pain of its acquisition and the accompanying loss of a fiancee and gain of a limp, chronic …
Bill Couturié's documentary compilation of archive footage and oral readings of letters from the Vietnam front lines. The only serious false notes in it -- the too discriminatingly hip selections of goldie-oldies are not seriously false -- are the suavely "professional" speaking voices of the narrators (Robert De Niro, Michael …
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 …
Globe-hopping paranoia thriller, tethered everywhere to cellphone and computer: Bangkok to Prague to Moscow to a fiery finish in (brace yourself) Omaha. Paralyzingly routine. With Shane West, Edward Burns, Ving Rhames, Tamara Feldman, Martin Sheen, and Jonathan Pryce; directed by Greg Marcks.