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 …
Filmmaker Anthony Minghella rounds up a cast from past Anthony Minghella films, Jude Law from Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ray Winstone from Cold Mountain only, Juliette Binoche from The English Patient, Juliet Stevenson from Truly Madly Deeply, plus new recruits Robin Wright Penn and, in an entertaining …
What does Robert Redford have to do to make you people understand how un-American the War on Terror really is? Does he have to plop you down into post-Civil War America? Will you make him hash out every possible parallel between the trial of Mary Surratt for her role in …
Sean Penn's second effort behind the cameras, after the narrowly released Indian Runner, is an effort indeed. It shows the writer-director at full stretch and on tiptoes, even though in artistic terms he is not yet a mature and well-developed adult. A heavy dependence on slow-motion for extra emotional and …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
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 …
The filmmaking debut of stage director Michael Mayer cannot much profit from the line of promotion stressing its shared origins in the author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham. It's true that the storyline spans a number of years, though nowhere near generations, the principal upshot of which is that the …
Deborah Kampmeier’s quasi Carson McCullers coming-of-age tale, set in rural Alabama in the late Fifties, attained some small notoriety, too small to amount to a full-blown controversy, as the Dakota Fanning Rape Movie. That boils it down a bit too far. Needless to say, thirteen-year-old girls have been known to …
Narrow and dim view of a circle of monotonous Hollywood nobodies. From the David Rabe stage play, which director Anthony Drazan has tried to cinematize through woozy camerawork, claustrophobic closeups, dialogue strung out over cell phones, and other futilities. To sum it up in a pet phrase of the cast …
A cautionary fable for those whose dream it is to escape the horrors of reality by ditching car and cell phone and swapping out big-city turmoil for a calming, less complicated existence in a remote Wyoming cabin. That’s precisely the direction Edee’s (Robin Wright, making her feature directorial debut) existential …
Robert Redford returns to Brubaker mode as a prison reformer, only this time it's a military prison and he himself is a prisoner, a much-decorated general, former Vietnam POW, author of the biblical Burden of Command, and a man of such loyalty and integrity that he opted not to fight …
The screen adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks romance novel -- about a disillusioned divorcee who runs across a half-buried bottle during a jog on the beach, finds an unsigned letter to a Lost Love inside, tracks down its author in a North Carolina coastal town, and applies, in essence, for …
Grimly unimaginative feminist odyssey through the stations of orphan, servant, prostitute, artist's model, artist's wife, artist's widow, mother, and (in a manner of speaking) mother of an orphan, before a final arrival at a poorly camouflaged Happily Ever After -- all under the benediction of an Eng. Lit. "classic," with …