No sooner does a full-color drone’s-eye-view offer up a glimpse of Belfast today, than we’re whisked over a fence and 50 years into a monochromatic past. For a city beset by civil war, it’s amazing how squeaky clean the streets look, as if set designers spent their evenings polishing each …
Or, Grand Hotel meets Downton Abbey in the old Merchant & Ivory curry kitchen. An aging bunch of swell Brits (though Penelope Wilton is a sour pickle) gather at a pretty, decaying hotel in Udaipur, India, for sunset lessons in living. It is very tidy and quaintly picturesque but humanly …
Taking the title from Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, the 007 franchise approaches the opportunity of a new James Bond as the opportunity of a new beginning. The new Bond, Daniel Craig, is not just another pretty face, in fact is a pretty craggy face (Craiggy face, perhaps that …
Another art-house food film: an agnostic chocolate-maker opens her Little Shop of Temptations during the Lenten fast. Director Lasse Hallstrom follows his discreet pro-choice propaganda (The Cider House Rules) with a smug, complacent, liberal-minded broadside against the smugness, complacency, and narrow-mindedness of a French-Catholic provincial village circa 1959. The motley …
The marble-eyed dragonslayer of Pitch Black -- a decent little movie, four years previous -- is enlisted, over his grumbled protests ("I just wanted to be left alone"), to face a bigger challenge: the planet-by-planet blitzkrieg of the Necromongers, otherwise known as the World-Enders, who want to bring everyone, everywhere, …
It is now (ahem) four decades since James Bond made his debut on screen, never mind another decade since his debut on the page: he must, as a film entity alone, be into his seventies by now. However you calculate it, he can ill afford to spend fourteen months in …
Going-through-the-motions Disney cartoon, a facetious, feminist (or cow-power) anti-Western wherein three heifers set out to capture Alameda Slim and save their dairy farm from foreclosure: "Huh! Bovine bounty hunters! Now I've seen everything." Voices of Roseanne Barr, Judi Dench, Jennifer Tilly, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.; written and directed by Will …
Overfurnished production of the Oscar Wilde farce: so much artifice does not require so much circumstantiation. And the jaunty, jazzy musical score is meddlesome at best, muffling at worst. (In any case it has not remedied the play's sag in the second act.) But the good lines are plentiful, and …
Dramatization of John Bayley's two tributes to his novelist wife, Iris Murdoch: Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris. The back-and-forth between early Iris (Kate Winslet) and Alzheimer's Iris (Judi Dench) keeps the film from ever quite getting going, though there's an undeniable poignancy in the spectacle of a meticulous …
The latest Jane Eyre movie is not an advance — despite fine settings, a haughty, soul-scarred Rochester portrayed by Michael Fassbender, and ace supporting figures (Judi Dench, Jamie Bell, Sally Hawkins). The story is scrambled by tricky time jumps and clumsily handled by director Cary Fukunaga. The main deficit is …
Under the stone-slab “classical” direction of Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio dutifully plays J. Edgar Hoover as an anal-retentive power freak and mama’s boy (Judi Dench is mom). Building the FBI, he strikes fierce poses but remains a weak, petty neurotic. Writer Dustin Lance Black (Milk) never digs very far, and …
What are you doing for Thanksgiving? You know — after dinner? How about watching Judi Dench in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale? Beats football.
The stranger who, in the nervous days before WWII, washes up on the Cornish shore, and into the lives of two elderly sisters, proves to be a Polish violin prodigy, whose sweet sounds catch the ear of a neighboring beauty on holiday, the sister of a world-famous maestro. A not …
Undramatic historical drama focussed myopically on the increasing influence of an impertinent Highlander over the widowed Queen Victoria. Stand-up comic Billy Connolly acquits himself well, but the capable Judi Dench starts out about fifteen years too old for the role, and the rest of the cast are cardboard. Directed by …
Portrait of a Plucky Old Lady, a screen species that tends more often than not to be British, a subspecies that tends these days to be Judi Dench. She -- Dame Judi -- plays here, very playfully indeed, a well-bred widow from WWII-era London, who, with time and money on …