Photojournalists in the early days of the civil strife in Yugoslavia. A Pulitzer winner from Newsweek, trapped inside a collapsed building, is presumed dead, but his wife, who afterwards receives an inaudible long-distance call and tentatively recognizes him (from behind) in news footage on CNN, believes he's still alive. So …
The fourth installment in J.K. Rowling's series of children's books yields a two-and-a-half-hour movie which, for all its furious activity, gets virtually nowhere. It gets, more specifically, through the "legendary" Triwizard Tournament, only to arrive at the dampening admonition, "Dark and difficult times lie ahead." Potterites, under the freedom-of-religion pact, …
Writer-director Martin McDonagh, in his feature debut, dispatches two British hit men to lie low, after a job with messy collateral damage, in the “fairy-tale” Medieval town near the coast of Belgium, where one of them (the tousled Brendan Gleeson) is interested in seeing the sights while the other (the …
Filmmaker John Boorman takes up the South African apartheid problem after its solution, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the mid-Nineties offered amnesty to political criminals, provided they could demonstrate a political motive for their crimes, in exchange for their public confession and confrontation of their victims. Juliette Binoche …
First, the good news: director Ron Howard does right by the whale in this story of the true story behind the greatest fish story of them all, Moby Dick. In contrast to nearly everything else — characters, action, themes — the massive marine mammal is presented clearly, potently, and without …
Astonishingly billed as the highest-grossing Irish independent film in history. Astonishingly, anyway, until you try to remember what you would have thought was the highest. It puts together a couple of fresh faces, the lumpily irregular one of newcomer Peter McDonald and the saggingly lived-in one of Brendan Gleeson, and …
Or, One More Reason Why the Middle East Hates the West. Back, back, back to the 12th Century, back to before the Third Crusade ("To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven"), equipped with cultural relativism, vats of blood, miles of slow-motion, and wave after …
Gruesome but unconcernedly lighthearted monster movie featuring a thirty-foot Asian crocodile who has somehow migrated to backwoods Maine. The dialogue, by the TV writer-producer David E. Kelley, has some snap and crackle, and Bridget Fonda is especially funny as a paleontologist who has no field experience but is not hesitant …
Writer-director-star Ben Affleck goes for broke and goes bust with an American tale that mistakes muchness for greatness. He plays Joe Coughlin, a vet who learned in World War I that “the rules we lived by were lies, and didn’t apply to those who made them.” (This line, like so …
It may be difficult to find a review of director and co-writer Paul King’s followup to his first take on Michael Bond’s émigré bear from darkest Peru that does not employ some form of the word “charming.” This is right and just, and the achievement is surely harder than the …
Denzel Washington rules again, his charisma little aged, but what’s the point of suavely dominating another spew of violent killings and barely credible suspense? Ryan Reynolds is a CIA agent whose boring life in South Africa is supercharged by the arrival of rogue super-agent Denzel. Also caught in the suction …
Largely hand-drawn animation, flat and unfluid, to mythologize the creation of a Medieval Irish illuminated manuscript, from which numerous visual motifs have been lifted. An esoteric cartoon (who’s it for?) to say the least, soporific to say the worst, so stylized as to eliminate the menace from a pack of …
Veteran director John Boorman's treatment of a "light" spy novel by John le Carré. Neither the director nor the original novelist (as well as co-screenwriter and executive producer) is much noted for humor, and their unabating stabs at it here are not so much martini-dry as they are day-old-champagne flat. …