Michael Caine as a bargain-basement Lothario with a heavy accent on cockney crassness, and with a cocksure understanding of where your sympathies and your scorn are supposed to fall. Like most movie ne'er-do-wells, particularly those who garner Oscar nominations, he melts into self-pitying sobs somewhere near the end. Directed by …
A new, updated, relocated Alfie — an Alfie for America, for the Bedhead generation, for the erectile-dysfunction era. He's still a Brit, and still talks straight to the camera, but now our lady-killer must be a chiselled Adonis (Jude Law) instead of a legitimate heir to Michael Caine (a Rhys …
Old Henry's last will and testament includes an ashes-scattering map for the three succeeding generations of males, Turner, Jason, and Zach. An insufferably cutesy salute to family ("A family carries each other"), regularly interrupted by ads for Kentucky Fried Chicken: mandatory stops on the map. With Christopher Walken, Josh Lucas, …
With a new director (Christopher Nolan) and a new star (Christian Bale), the fifth entry in the Batman series, true to its title, returns to square one: how and why Bruce Wayne came to be Batman; the psychological root of his fixation on flying mammals; the part this played in …
The enlistment of Nora Ephron, director and (with her sister Delia) cowriter, assures a level of smartness unexpected in a transplant from the small screen to the big. Not at all a reasonable facsimile of the Sixties sitcom about the witchy housewife with the twitchy nose, it is rather a …
The cast of characters includes a whisky-sodden British diplomat, an ex-prostitute Indian wife, an ex-seminarian Paraguayan rebel, an apolitical, amoral doctor with allegiances to all of the above, an implacable South American policeman -- well, it's Graham Greene, you see. The Honorary Consul, to be precise. The abbreviated TV style …
Quits being a drooling travelogue just often enough and long enough to be a drooling sex comedy. Two middle-aged fathers take their full-grown daughters on holiday; one of the fathers has an affair with one of the daughters (not his own). This comes about (Dad blame it!) because the daughter …
Bob Rafelson's next-generation film noir re-establishes, to a noteworthy degree, the connection of the genre to reality and realism. It is not an hommage. It is not an imitation. It is not a hand-me-down. It is a legitimate continuation in a contemporary setting. And if it has lost something in …
The re-staging of Operation Market Garden, the Allies' ill-conceived attempt to capture a string of Nazi-occupied Dutch bridges, takes three hours on screen, and the complex logistics of the attack seem sufficient in themselves to hold your interest for that long. But the chief reason for the film's largeness is …
West Coast transplant of Plaza Suite is second-gear Neil Simon, a quartet of sketches allowing for a slew of Southern California jokes ("It's like paradise with a lobotomy") and moving progressively into lower and lower comedy. Simon is on his happiest level in the one with Maggie Smith as a …
The basic idea — from a novel by P.D. James, a departure from her detective fiction — of a worldwide plague of female infertility, even though not at all original (see The Handmaid's Tale, as a prime example), remains nevertheless a potent metaphor for that science-fiction staple, the End of …
Lasse Hallstrom's treatment of the John Irving Bildungsroman of the same name: a Second World War period piece centered around one Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire), an abused orphan -- "twice adopted, twice returned" -- and the chosen understudy to the kindly doctor and backdoor abortionist (Michael Caine) who runs the …
Fashionably “dark” comic-book movie, the first one to think of putting the darkness right up in the title — a synonym, that, for “the bat man,” as he is frequently and unfamiliarly referred to, or simply Batman to you and me. Aside from the title, the second installment in Christopher …
Comedy-thriller in the Sleuth mold, similar to the aforesaid down to having a writer of thrillers as its devious protagonist, and to having its origins undisguisably on the stage. It would be difficult to foresee every tricksy plot twist, and yet it would be difficult to be truly surprised by …