Soft warm cozy sports story from the maker of The Rookie, John Lee Hancock, about a headstrong well-to-do white Memphis housewife who takes under her wing and under her roof a homeless black gentle giant, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Sandra Bullock stays obstinately on the surface of …
Multicharacter tapestry of the seething melting pot of L.A., an object lesson on racial and ethnic stereotypes, attitudes, biases, tensions. The didactic impulse overrules good sense: a bigoted cop, for just one example, gives a hard time to a respectable black couple at the side of the road, and then …
2032 A.D. The repressive utopia of San Angeles (merger of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego) is disrupted when a 20th-century criminal called Simon Phoenix (the name is bad enough; the yellow hair is worse) escapes from cryo-prison. The cop who put him there, and who has inhabited an ice …
The title alone told you that you needed to read no further in the Rebecca Wells novel. But the screen version, written and directed by Callie Khouri, temptingly makes room for one of our premier performers, Ellen Burstyn, in addition to Fionnula Flanagan, Maggie Smith, and Shirley Knight, troupers one …
Extremely ambitious and incredibly pretentious. Also false. A brainy, yappy New York boy (Thomas Horn) feels guilty about not answering the WTC calls of his doomed dad (Tom Hanks) on 9/11/01. He walks around New York looking for fishy clues, and a mute, grizzled man (Max von Sydow) tags along …
Grind-it-out road comedy about a slightly uptight hunk (Ben Affleck, as loose-limbed as usual) who sows his first and last wild oats between New York City and Savannah, under the guidance of a free-spirited cutenik (Sandra Bullock, the Kerouac of cuteniks), while on his way to his own wedding. The …
No, not the Ben Affleck Sandra Bullock mutual career low point. This is about forces even more devastating. If you can believe that. Volcanoes and earthquakes and stuff.
An illustrated existential crisis. Or, a survival story in which nearly every exterior event carries interior significance. Either way, it's gripping. The story is simple: an astronaut (a smooth-faced Sandra Bullock), cut loose from her spiritual moorings by a freak accident, is cut loose from her physical moorings by another …
It’s snob vs. slob as a tenacious Sandra Bullock stars alongside Melissa “What the fuck’s your problem?” McCarthy to form an unlikely pair of detectives (Laurel & Sharty?) forced to partner on cracking a dope ring. Set up, punchline, setup, punchline: Ms. Bullock puts the gags on a tee for …
A slathering application of elbow grease in an effort to buff up the marmoreal screen image of Sandra Bullock. But no sort of luster can come through the layer-of-dust cinematography. The opening sequence, in which the heroine gets sandbagged on a Ricki Lake-like talk show with the news of her …
Substantially the same story as Capote a year earlier, an uncomfortable proximity that brings to mind the competing Columbuses of 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus or the competing Earps of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. A second account, written and directed by Douglas McGrath, of the birth pains of …
Old-fashioned wartime romance, a bit faded, a bit wilted, but after all it's an old war -- the Great War -- and the romance is the historical one of Ernie "Kid" Hemingway and his Red Cross nurse in Italy. (The leg wound, the near amputation, and the broken heart would …
Irrationally romantic remake of a South Korean film with the Italian name of Il Mare, set in a Lifetime Channel fantasyland where every romantic hero is an architect (the artistic businessman), every romantic heroine is a doctor (the nurturing career woman), and every dream house is on the water (the …
A pair of ex brothers-in-law from the Bluegrass State (hushful Paul Eenhoorn and blustery Foghorn Leghorn proxy, Earl Lynn Nelson) are set adrift on a garrulous, firstclass Shirley Valentine cruise to Iceland. Sony Pictures Classics harpooned this understated, sprinkled-with-sugar two-character travel yarn after its debut at Sundance. David Gordon Green …