An older-woman-younger-man affair, stickier than normal because the older woman's therapist happens also to be the younger man's mother. The therapist/mother, a bespectacled, beanbaggy Meryl Streep, is the only one of the three who sees the whole picture, who knows that her twenty-three-year-old son, Bryan Greenberg, has become romantically involved …
Writer-director Jane Anderson's adaptation of the memoir by Terry Ryan (the book's subtitle: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less), a valentine to a dutiful, long-suffering Fifties-era Catholic housewife who supplemented the family's meager income through the practice of "contesting," writing ad slogans and jingles for …
For posterity, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprise their roles in the Broadway musical, together with Gary Beach and Roger Bart, while Uma Thurman (with a funny SVEE-dish accent) appropriates the cheesecake, and Will Ferrell goose-steps into the part of the playwright of Springtime for Hitler, "A New Neo-Nazi Musical." …
Director John Madden puts on the Pulitzer Prize play by David Auburn, a hoked-up sort of mathematical mystery thriller, not so much a whodunit as a whoprovedit, centered around the mentally shaky daughter of a mentally crumpled math genius: two beautiful minds. (With Philip Glass-y motor-gunning, engine-revving background music by …
Economical, efficient, taut little thriller from Wes Craven, a terror film in place of his customary horror film. The normal business of a modern-day airport, with its flight delays and frayed nerves ("Flying's so much fun these days, huh?"), makes for a smooth and easy access to the subject of …
Shoestring documentary (i.e., video) by Steve James, maker of Stevie and Hoop Dreams. On this less personal project, he appears to be no more than a hired hand, summoned to Fiji to document the last month of the year-long sojourn of John Pierson, the indie-film "guru" and TV host of …
Jonathan Larson's Broadway musical comes to the screen, a quick-time parade of undistinguished and largely indistinguishable songs in celebration of bohemian bonhomie on the Lower East Side, tested by AIDS, drugs, romantic intrigues. Director Chris Columbus does a workmanlike job of "opening up" the action into realistic spaces, thoroughly explored, …
After the spectacle of his historical martial-arts epics, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou returns to the simplicity of modern life: the quixotic quest of a taciturn Japanese fisherman -- cutting through miles and miles, if not thousands, of Chinese red tape, reminiscent of The Story of Qiu …
For the sequel, director Gore Verbinski has handed over the franchise to the man who made the Japanese originals, Hideo Nakata. He, perhaps a bit too close to the material for too long, seems to presume that the spectator will have committed the previous chapter to memory, or, if not, …
A follow-that-dream fairy tale set in a world of robots, anthropomorphized and sentimentalized to such extent that an assembly-required baby-bot will grow organically into a tot-bot and a teen-bot and ultimately a budding inventor-bot. It offers, as they say, something for everyone: fart jokes and big-butt jokes, pop-culture allusions, corporate …
Barren ground for the comic charms of Jennifer Aniston, as a hesitant fiancé investigating the possibility that her Pasadena family was the model for the Robinsons in The Graduate. That would make Shirley MacLaine Mrs. Robinson, and Kevin Costner the nuptial Lochinvar. (A self-described "dilettante Che biographer," he ignorantly pronounces …
"A Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventure," trumpet the opening credits. Those are of course two separate people, Clive Cussler being the original novelist, and Dirk Pitt (wham! bam!) being his swashbuckling hero, who, along with his comical sidekick Al Giordino, is hunting a treasure-laden Civil War ironclad up the Niger …
This video concert film, directed by Liam Lynch, gives the moviegoer a ticket to the titular comic's stand-up routine, or one-woman off-Broadway show if you prefer. The coy prologue and epilogue with two other actors, and the intermittent cutaways for illustrational fantasies and flashbacks (with costume changes and hair re-dos), …