A passable time-whiler about a Hawaiian honeymoon spoiled by a pair of psycho killers (Hawaii itself spoiled by unglorious muddy color). There’s a trick to it, inasmuch as any thriller these days has to have a trick to it if it’s not to be seen as hopelessly elementary and complacent. …
Steve Martin carries the Inspector Clouseau torch into a sequel, thoroughly doused though the flame may be. (Kevin Kline got out while the getting was good, leaving the role of Clouseau’s superior to John Cleese, with unaltered British accent. And previous director Shawn Levy handed the bag to Harald Zwart.) …
Retrospective smugness around the swashbuckling rock-and-roll partisans who in the mid-Sixties were broadcasting their preferred music from the high seas in order to circumvent British bluenoses (represented one-dimensionally by Kenneth Branagh). The freedom fighters are as insufferable as the oppressors, making it difficult to take sides. Wall-to-wall golden oldies, with …
Grandpa and grandson in parallel amorous pursuits, swapping tips, trading secrets. Marc Fienberg’s Amateur Hour and Three-Quarters, his first feature film, amounts to a terrible mortification for anyone on screen or in front of it, not least of all Andy Griffith, required to react to a hard-on and a blow …
Romanian policier revolving around, in fact never abandoning for a single scene, a droopy narc (Dragos Bucur) reluctant to bust an adolescent casual user. The long takes and solid frames have much integrity and almost as much tedium; the dismal locales are for better or worse completely immersing; and the …
Hayao Miyazaki further postpones his announced retirement three feature films earlier, and appears to reverse the slippage of his hand-drawn purism into corner-cutting computer animation, reverting to a simpler, less congested style than in Spirited Away and even more Howl’s Moving Castle. His famous sensitivity to nature is immediately on …
Hayao Miyazaki further postpones his announced retirement three feature films earlier, and appears to reverse the slippage of his hand-drawn purism into corner-cutting computer animation, reverting to a simpler, less congested style than in Spirited Away and even more Howl’s Moving Castle. His famous sensitivity to nature is immediately on …
Hayao Miyazaki further postpones his announced retirement three feature films earlier, and appears to reverse the slippage of his hand-drawn purism into corner-cutting computer animation, reverting to a simpler, less congested style than in Spirited Away and even more Howl’s Moving Castle. His famous sensitivity to nature is immediately on …
Thick-laid comedy with Alexis Bledel as an honors graduate of fictitious Creston U., who, unwelcomed in the job market, struggles to escape the embarrassments of her family (Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch, Carol Burnett). The viewer can sympathize, but he can also choose to escape sooner. With Zach Gilford, Rodrigo Santoro, …
A bit of well-meaning manipulation, unevenly photographed, alternately oversaturated and washed-out and glossy and grainy, centered around a Harlem African-American illiterate obese unwed teenage mother of a Down’s daughter, now pregnant again, expelled from school, abused and battered at home by her welfare mother, an incestuous rape victim of her …
Throwback Disney cartoon, a blessed retreat from plumped-up computer animation and smart-aleck anachronisms. The updated and retailored fairy tale serves primarily as a valentine to Old New Orleans: jazz, voodoo, gumbo, beignets, riverboat, streetcar (okay, one sneaky anachronism: “Stell-ahhhh!”). The songs, though they mostly stay true to the place and …
Filmmaker Kimberly Reed, née Paul McKerrow, takes her digital camera back to Helena, Montana, ostensibly to document her twentieth-anniversary high-school reunion — the star quarterback now a transsexual — but the spotlight is stolen, the course of the movie altered, by her unstable brain-damaged adoptive brother Marc, revealed to be …
Anne Fletcher’s contemporary romantic comedy has a premise no more ridiculous than something that might once have featured Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. The editor-in-chief at Ruick & Hunt Publishers, a transplanted Canadian ice queen slash wicked witch of the north, now threatened with deportation for an expired visa, commands …
John Dillinger revamped for a new century, more particularly Michael Mann-handled: high-def video, flattened perspective, eye-crossing closeups, jittery hand-held camera, frenetic cutting, amped-up sound, and the legendary Lady in Red is now (truth be told, among much romanticizing) the lady in orange skirt and white blouse. Pretty Boy Johnny Depp, …