The ripening of Miss Jane Austen, fictitiously re-imagined as a type of character in one of her own novels (minus the fairy-tale ending) and proportionately diminished as an artistic genius: a copyist more than a creator. The cast -- Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith, Lucy …
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 …
West Coast transplant of Plaza Suite is second-gear Neil Simon, a quartet of sketches allowing for a slew of Southern California jokes ("It's like paradise with a lobotomy") and moving progressively into lower and lower comedy. Simon is on his happiest level in the one with Maggie Smith as a …
Following in Albert Finney's footprints, Peter Ustinov perpetuates the corpulent screen image of master detective Hercule Poirot, but this balloon-like inflation (nearer to Nero Wolfe) will be a bother only to the most fanatical followers of Agatha Christie, the queen of the "who cares?" whodunit. In this one, the murder …
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 …
Early on in this upstairs-downstairs story built around the King and Queen of England’s overnight visit to the titular country estate, a kitchen girl tells a footman to get the soufflés upstairs before they collapse. A soufflé is a light and airy confection of unvaryingly smooth consistency, and so is …
Matrimonial, as opposed to occupational, 9 to 5, with three high-wattage actresses exacting rah-rah revenge on the husbands who dumped them for younger women. The tripartite story -- an old, old, old story, too -- requires some laborious exposition and development. Each of the stars -- Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, …
Matrimonial, as opposed to occupational, 9 to 5, with three high-wattage actresses exacting rah-rah revenge on the husbands who dumped them for younger women. The tripartite story -- an old, old, old story, too -- requires some laborious exposition and development. Each of the stars -- Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, …
A Shakespearean herald reading the play’s old prologue is comically yanked at the beginning. So much for the literary roots, and despite mostly British accents, the wit leans to “Adios, loser,” “Let’s kick some grass,” and a “pansy” joke as garden gnomes fill out plastic remnants of the Romeo and …
From Robert Altman, a pleasant if overlong divertissement that combines the British class-conscious social satire with the dark-and-stormy-night murder mystery: Evelyn Waugh meets Agatha Christie. In short, Altman hell: etiquette, decorum, hierarchy on the one side, and convention, formula, artifice on the other. However much the director might distance himself …
The children's book by J.K. Rowling, now a movie by Chris Columbus — maker of, among others, Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, Nine Months, Stepmom, and Bicentennial Man, chief rival of Steven Spielberg for his in-touchness with the Inner Child. No longer applicable, quite plainly, will be the …
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 …
Miss Shepherd, the titular lady — played without a trace of self-regard or emotional grasping by Maggie Smith — does not have much of a life. It’s hard to get much going when you live in a van, harder still when you’re old and slightly daft and imprisoned by your …
The basic situation -- that of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy whose long tenure in County Cork causes them to sympathize and identify with the Irish in their fight for independence, post-WWI, even though the Irish natives do not return the affection -- is inherently interesting, and is made more so, or …
A classical stage actor (Christopher Plummer), whose great regret is that he never hit it big on screen, sees his last chance in the latest script by his wife (Maggie Smith). But the part calls for a sensitive European, and she doesn't think he's right for it. So he dips …