The Middle East conflict narrowed down to the arena of a half-century-old lemon grove that a Palestinian widow has inherited from her father and that borders the new residence of the Israeli Defense Minister. The fruit was there first, and the minister moved in next door, and the Secret Service …
Bullied blond Swedish schoolboy meets dark and dusky Miss Tween Vampire. Slow, almost ludicrously sensitive, ninety-five-percent realistic and unfantastic. The other five percent houses some mild chills: the girl’s monkeylike shimmy up the outside wall of a hospital; the mass cat attack on a new vampire convert; the sweat and …
Parallel plotlines framed inside a machine-gun high-school massacre, unveiling in flashback the events leading up to it as well as jumping ahead fifteen years to reveal the life of a guilty survivor, now a teacher herself at the school, with a husband and daughter at home. Uma Thurman might be …
Cripplingly cheap comedy with the promising premise of a sort of Hindi Idol talent contest — the competitors singing cover versions of Bollywood hit tunes — sponsored by “the largest suppliers of pork loins on the East Coast,” a/k/a “The Loin King.” It has almost no assets beyond the funny …
Another dish of gritty naturalism from the Dardenne brothers of Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc, zeroing in on an immigration scam in which profit trumps human life. The plot, as noir as they come, is perhaps a tad more complex than the Dardennes are accustomed to or comfortable with. And, in …
Mike Myers, with an unfunny funny voice and a dime-store false beard, plays an American-born, Indian-raised self-help prophet (the Number Two man behind Deepak Chopra), whose path to the Oprah show goes through the locker room of the Toronto Maple Leafs. The hockey fan and the Hindu follower might be …
Contrived road movie wherein three wounded vets from the Iraq War, strangers to one another stranded at a shut-down airport, drive westbound in a rental car: a latter-generation The Best Years of Our Lives, better thought of as The Forgettable Year of Our Lives. (Sample contrivance: the soldier wounded in …
The light-in-the-loafers cartoon lion, a self-professed “protégé of Fosse and Robbins,” accidentally finds his way, along with the zebra, the hippo, and the giraffe, back to his ancestral home, where he proves to be an embarrassment to his kingly father: “Lions don’t dance.” The not so subtle pleas for diversity …
A pathological playboy, busy collecting royalties on his invention of the cardboard “coffee collar,” realizes he’s in love when his platonic girlfriend of ten years goes off on a business trip to Scotland and comes home engaged to a duke. (The perfect man if he weren’t a Scot.) A couple …
A demographically diverse trio of women (Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, Katie Holmes) are of undivided mind about the wisdom and fun of siphoning off wrinkled old bills, marked for shredding, from the Kansas City Federal Reserve. The director, Callie Khouri, makes a unanimous fourth. A caper comedy heedless of consequences, …
The Catherine Johnson stage musical brought to the screen under its stage director, Phyllida Lloyd: a romantic-comic bauble about a scheduled wedding on a Greek island, to which the bride-to-be, unknown to her mother, has invited the three men who are sole candidates to be her biological father. (All three …
Filmmaker James Marsh takes a novel approach to the topic of the World Trade Center, a caper documentary (to coin a genre) on the forty-five-minute funambulist stunt undertaken in 1974 by the Frenchman Philippe Petit, walking a tightwire between the Twin Towers. The events of 9/11 are never mentioned, but …
Let’s not forget Jenny. Marley is the rambunctious Labrador — “the world’s worst dog” — meant to tide Jenny over till she and Me (real-life newspaper columnist John Grogan) can make some babies. As it turns out, we follow the dog through the arrival of three children and a move …
Tepid adaptation of a classic John Bingham thriller, Five Roundabouts to Heaven, moved to America, but kept in the post-WWII period, and instilled with a modern condescension to the past, along with a modern irony, drollery, jadedness. The casting and playing of Pierce Brosnan and Chris Cooper tip off the …
Stephen Higgins’s and Nina Gilden Seavey’s digital documentary on Spanish bullfighting, mostly on the individual quest of the young torero David Fandila, “El Fandi,” to become only the thirteenth in history to do a hundred corridas in a single season. Though the filmmakers aren’t there when he finally does it, …