The task of tailoring the time-travel theme to the teenage market has led to, besides such concrete accessories as skateboards and electric guitars, an inordinate dwelling on anachronisms, with a contemporary teenager plunged (much like an addict of TV's Happy Days, only deeper) into the Fifties. It's as though the …
The task of tailoring the time-travel theme to the teenage market has led to, besides such concrete accessories as skateboards and electric guitars, an inordinate dwelling on anachronisms, with a contemporary teenager plunged (much like an addict of TV's Happy Days, only deeper) into the Fifties. It's as though the …
A loud, ugly, ungodly mess. It starts out with what's already the biggest pill to swallow in a time-travel adventure, and proceeds to let this snowball into a burden of disbelief such as could not be suspended by wire cables. Namely: the manufacture of a mobile time machine which, by …
Anyone who wasn't lost, in one sense or another, in Part II will have plenty more opportunity here: plenty more of that formula of obviousness and overstatement blended with in-jokes and incoherence. This time, science fiction collides with the Western (as our aging teenager travels to 1885 in his Nikes), …
Computer-animated comic-book transcription of the unloved epic poem of the 8th Century. Director Robert Zemeckis goes even further with the motion-capture technique of The Polar Express, staking out the borderland between live action and cartoon, and throwing in 3-D to boot. Ray Winstone, voicing the dragon-slaying hero, has been prettified …
Disney's re-do is probably better the fewer times you've read, seen, or heard the story. With or without 3-D, this is nevertheless a lavishly, lovingly, and imaginatively illustrated edition of the Dickens holiday classic, in a graphic style congenial to a Victorian ghost story, and in a motion-capture computer-animation technique …
Starry-eyed science fiction, seemingly designed or destined to be blurbified into a "2001 for the Nineties" — complete with otherworldly light show and a solarized encounter with a Higher Intelligence. The very opening of the movie lays out the fictional terrain — light-years and light-years of it — as we …
Elixir-of-life fantasy about the rivalry between an aging actress and best-selling dietician. There's something Twilight Zone-y about the blend of black comedy and Sunday sermon, as well as about the anecdotal narrative. There is nothing Twilight Zone-y about the Silly Putty special effects -- as costly and seamless as they …
Three decades in the life of a mental midget (I.Q., 75) who leaves giant footprints on his twisting path, in rather sharp contradiction of the feather-on-the-wind visual motif at movie's beginning and end. The traversal of so much history permits the filmmaker, Robert Zemeckis, to resume his wrong-end-of-the-telescope examination of …
Hollywood generally casts the intellectually challenged in either a pitiable light or one that makes a lack of intelligence look like an advantage. If one must remake a movie, make it a bad one. And then do it one better. That is precisely what director Advait Chandan did with this …
The task of tailoring the time-travel theme to the teenage market has led to, besides such concrete accessories as skateboards and electric guitars, an inordinate dwelling on anachronisms, with a contemporary teenager plunged (much like an addict of TV's Happy Days, only deeper) into the Fifties. It's as though the …
Neither an "instant classic" nor the polar opposite, but a middling addition to the holiday repertoire: computerized illustrations of the Chris Van Allsburg children's book about a little boy already too old to believe in Santa ("This is your crucial year"), snatched out of his bed on Christmas Eve for …