A remake of Manhunter, 1986, for the sole purpose of instating the "real" Hannibal Lecter -- Anthony Hopkins -- in the role. (It would have been simpler, if it would have been technologically possible, to cut-and-paste him digitally into the pre-existing film, obliterating Brian Cox.) And never mind that the …
A plague of napalm-breathing dragons plunges the planet into a new Dark Age. The computer-animated dragons are well designed, although (a common drawback of computer animation) they're a bit fast and agile for their size. Nice opening scene of the first dragon aroused from slumber in the London underground; amusing …
Brand-new brainstorm from the maker of Mortal Kombat, Paul W.S. Anderson (not to be confused with the maker of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson): back to the video-game shelf for an ugly, ultra-violent, live-action dramatization, set somewhere called the Hive, underground headquarters of something called the Umbrella Corporation, sometime in …
Brand-new brainstorm from the maker of Mortal Kombat, Paul W.S. Anderson (not to be confused with the maker of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson): back to the video-game shelf for an ugly, ultra-violent, live-action dramatization, set somewhere called the Hive, underground headquarters of something called the Umbrella Corporation, sometime in …
Mentally unbalanced fisherman's wife (Valeria Golino) in revolt against the brutalities of her bleak Mediterranean island. The lack of a diagnosis makes her symptoms more interesting, but the actual revolt and noncommittal resolution dampen the interest. Written and directed by Emanuele Crialese.
This must surely set a new record for length of delay between a film and its sequel: forty-nine years since Peter Pan. As he can never grow old, this is no problem for Peter. And as he's a cartoon, nor is it a problem for an actor playing him: the …
Heavily hyped remake of a little-seen Japanese horror film follows around a Nancy Drew reporter (Naomi Watts) as she looks into the rumor of a videotape that kills its viewers one week to the minute after they view it. She even looks at the tape herself after intrepidly tracking down …
Cinematic monograph on the environmental sculptor Andy Goldsworthy: privileged access to the artist at work (and, briefly, at his home in Penpont, Scotland), as well as to his thoughts on the matter. German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer's crisp image is duly appreciative of the art -- oftentimes transient works of natural …
Inflated, arty, but satisfactory reworking of an old gangster-film formula. The sense of raising the bar (in the fashionable phrase) seems quite ostentatious at the outset, with its unmistakable evocation of The Godfather. These are Irish gangsters instead of Italian, and they are gathered for a wake instead of a …
It's not only Roger who's a dodger. It's also the cameraman: he feints, he zigzags, he bobs and weaves. (Under instruction, presumably, from novice writer-director Dylan Kidd.) Like Roberto Duran in pursuit of Sugar Ray Leonard, the spectator might want to throw up his manos and say no más. The …
It begins at dawn's first light with a nice quiet distant hilltop silhouette of bikers, a van, a pantomimed conference of some sort. This is the last nice thing in the movie. Even if the ensuing scene of two young daredevils in a luge-on-wheels race down the streets of San …
Off the Disney conveyor belt of inspirational sports stories comes the real-life odyssey of Jim Morris, high-school science teacher and extracurricular baseball coach in Big Lake, Texas, whose own pitching career was cut short by shoulder surgery, then revived when he tried out, on a dare from his players, for …
The director of Killing Zoe (Roger Avary) unites with the novelist of American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis), to reach the combined maturity of a know-it-all sophomore (high school, not college), for a view of the modern university as a libertine's paradise of casual sex, drugs, and Nietzscheanism. It starts, you …
Alexander Sokurov's one-shot movie, approximately ninety minutes in duration, a digital-video Steadicam snaking through the bowels and galleries of the Hermitage Museum, down its hallways and staircases, out onto its snow-covered grounds, with never a single edit, notwithstanding any reel changes that might manufacture an illusion of a cut: one …