A new, updated, relocated Alfie — an Alfie for America, for the Bedhead generation, for the erectile-dysfunction era. He's still a Brit, and still talks straight to the camera, but now our lady-killer must be a chiselled Adonis (Jude Law) instead of a legitimate heir to Michael Caine (a Rhys …
Laundered biography of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and madman, John Forbes Nash, Jr. It's his madness, of course, and not his math, that makes him a viable screen subject, and director Ron Howard nurtures it with care. (And with more taste and restraint than are his custom.) But between the …
Nonsensical retelling of the Dan Brown best-seller, premised on "the greatest cover-up in human history," namely the murderously guarded secret that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene married and multiplied. (The additional premise that the disclosure of the secret would have the immediate effect of liberating the oppressed worldwide and bringing …
Danish director Lars von Trier follows up Dancer in the Dark with another unrecognizable portrait of America. A pedantic or facetious moral tale, it takes place in Depression-period costume on a sparse and stylized stage set, which from overhead looks like a near life-sized blueprint of a tiny town in …
Ridiculous heist-and-hostage thriller that requires the retirement-age Harrison Ford to shoulder altogether too much of the burden of heroics -- all of it, to be exact -- as much as Jean-Claude Van Damme shouldered at half the age. And this in the role of a family-man Seattle banker! Not an …
The classic story of the upwardly mobile mobster, retold in fish-and-chips British accents, fish-eye lenses, slow-motion, split screens, coarse and corroded color, flashbacks and flashforwards, not to mention Dahmer-esque or Ed Gein-ian peaks of gore. At the hard heart of the film is the scene (with thanks to Tarantino) in …
Discombobulating experience in the vein of The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride, a defense of books framed in the form of an ugly movie. Is the ugliness deliberate? Designed to send a repulsed viewer to the placid regularity of the printed page? The postulate here has to do with …
The Dark Ages lightened up: a rock-and-roll songtrack (Queen, Bowie, BTO, others), a spontaneous eruption of disco dancing at court, a Nike insignia on a suit of armor, a Mademoiselle cover girl for a fair maiden, and a centuries-ahead-of-his-time democratic hero, a lowborn squire who skyrockets to superstardom in the …
The fate of the world plays out at a roadside diner in Paradise Falls at the edge of the Mojave Desert: the Archangel Michael and the Archangel Gabriel battle over the imminent illegitimate baby of a dirty-blond hash-slinger. Bombastic horror film with idiotic dialogue: “Either your child lives or mankind …
Not bad, if you want the 2008 financial collapse reduced to an adrenalized ego showdown in f-wordy debt to David Mamet. Kevin Spacey is the greed pig who squishes best. Jeremy Irons is the predator who heads the investment firm, seeming to welcome disaster with a shark’s appetite. Writer-director J.C. …
The first screen incarnation of Lucky Jack Aubrey, hero of Patrick O'Brian's loved and admired series of historical adventure novels, captain of the British man-of-war, the HMS Surprise. This is preeminently a boys' story, and as pure and innocent a specimen as you are apt to find anymore, uncorrupted by …
A five-genre pileup: buddy-cop flick, supernatural thriller, Western, dystopian-future sci-fi, and straight-up monster horror. Sorting through the wreckage is more trouble than it’s worth. The Western stuff works better than the rest (despite the multiple Clint Eastwood impersonations); the tension within the thrown-together partnership of lawman and warrior-priest provides the …
Medieval detective yarn about an innovative troupe of travelling players, including an incognito fallen priest, who deviate from Bible stories and (pioneers of the modern docudrama) tackle a local serial-murder case: "We'll perform this afternoon, and use the morning to find out more of what happened." Excitable, not to say …
The place is South Carolina, the time is 1964, right when LBJ has signed the Civil Rights Act (“Nothin’ but a piece of paper”). An abused white teenage runaway and her fugitive black maid find refuge at a honey farm of “cultured” black sisters named after months of the year, …