Inflated remake of the Robert Penn Warren Pulitzer-winner, with the pseudonymous "Willie Stark" as Louisiana governor Huey Long, and Oscar-winner Sean Penn as Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford. Penn, sporting a Trotskyite haircut as the backwater populist politician ("Ain't nobody ever helped a hick 'cept a hick hisself"), speaks in an accent …
A crafty, good-looking Roman Polanski film of a facile but entertainingly bitchy play by Yasmina Reza, sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? funneling into Who’s Afraid of Neil Simon? Two married couples (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) fume, spar, and rip apart their …
The passage of two years after his 6-year-old daughter’s death finds grieving advertising exec Will Smith addressing letters to Love, Time, and Death. Reasoning that two years is adequate time to suffer, his callous co-workers and purported BFFs (Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, and Michael Pena) employ a private investigator to …
A global plague quickly dispatches Gwyneth Paltrow, but Marion Cotillard and Kate Winslet carry on the fight as noble doctors. Lawrence Fishburne is the solemn voice of humane science, like Dennis Haysbert intoning for Allstate Insurance. Steven Soderbergh directed with brisk, methodical care for the big vista and small details, …
Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet narrate this journey into the depths...of the sea.
Out for revenge, seamstress-turned-sleuth Kate WInslet returns to her rural Australian hometown and, using haute couture much the same way Sherlock Holmes would apply deductive reasoning, cracks a decades old crime that positioned her as a murderess. Thankfully, this was a lot darker than anticipated. For over half its running …
Second World War espionage thriller, set on the British homefront at Bletchley Park, otherwise known as Station X, the top-secret cryptography center, where they've now got just four days to crack "Shark," the revised German U-boat code, before a convoy of merchant ships from the U.S. enters perilous waters. In …
Charlie Kaufman, scriptwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, drills a new tunnel into his favorite fictional locale, the human brain, this time by way of the science-fictional device of an illicit memory-erasure service called Lacuna, Inc. ("Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage, but …
Academic exercise, adapted from an unrenowned theater piece entitled The Man Who Was Peter Pan, that purports to show how the playwright J.M. Barrie sculpted the glazed statue of Peter Pan from the soft clay of his real-life relationship with a widow and her four boys. (Albeit a platonic relationship, …
Animation from the Aardman Studios, not claymation, like their signature Wallace and Gromit series (and not Nick Park directing), but instead compliant, acquiescent computer animation, and a compliantly, acquiescently crasser and cruder sense of humor to go along with it. (Traces of which began to creep into the feature-length Wallace …
The Kenneth Branagh incarnation (blond like Olivier's). The prime selling point for this vulgarly overscaled remake of Shakespeare's revenge tragedy is that it presents for the first time on screen, at a length of four full hours, the uncondensed text, for which Branagh demonstrates his reverence by pouring buckets of …
True-crime story, out of New Zealand, about two early-adolescent schoolgirls who form an "unwholesome attachment" and who bludgeon one of their mothers to death when the two of them are about to be forcibly pried apart. Directed with enormous energy by Peter Jackson, of Dead-Alive fame or infamy, it is …
Time-capsule exoticism centering around a free-thinking Englishwoman in search of Sufi wisdom in Morocco, 1972, with her two young daughters in tow. More travelogue than narrative — an effect heightened by the montage-y brevity of most of the scenes — but nice bright color. And director Gillies MacKinnon, who handled …
Writer and director Nancy Meyers arranges an Internet home exchange, for two weeks at Christmastime, between two wounded women desperate to get away: a London newspaper columnist (Kate Winslet) with a cozy cottage in Surrey, and a Hollywood trailer-cutter (Cameron Diaz) with a modernist mansion in Beverly Hills. The agreed-upon …