Matthew Vaughn, producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, tries his own hand at directing one of these tough and tricksy British crime thrillers: a brutal cutie. Well played by Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, George Harris, Kenneth Cranham, Jamie Foreman, Sally Hawkins, Michael Gambon, among others, but …
A seven-year slice -- more like a mince -- of the life of British painter Francis Bacon and his S&M relationship with his model, George Dyer. John Maybury's attempt to recapture in live action the "atmosphere" of a Bacon painting, without actually showing any, relies on the cold mechanics of …
Post-menopausal romance (it might as aptly have been titled The Grandmother) centered around a brand-new widow, a self-described "shapeless old lump," who warms up to her son's hunky, hairy handyman and her daughter's married boyfriend (one and the same man) and warms him up in turn: "I thought nobody would …
Steven Spielberg's profoundly pessimistic account of the terrorist massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the bloody aftermath of tit-for-tat reprisals. The director, while he plainly wants to pay his respects to all parties, has not rid himself of his grandiosity and his self-indulgence. The overextended running …
The series peaked with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the bean-counters at EON Productions considered it Ian Fleming’s red-headed stepchild. The producers faulted George Lazenby, the first post-Connery 007, for the film’s initial lack of grosses and canned him after one outing. The commonality between that film and this …
After parting ways with the 007 franchise, Pierce Brosnan continues to outsource James Bond in a modish manner that should make Daniel Craig’s blue eyes green with envy. The November Man follows Tailor of Panama and The Matador with this rip-snorting tale of a high level CIA official who drops …
The first true sequel in the twenty-odd entries of the James Bond series, picking up our Blond Bond (Daniel Craig) on the trail of vengeance after the death of his ladylove, Vesper, at the end of Casino Royale. (This was a trail closed off to the newly widowed Bond at …
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 …
James Bond lumbers back to his roots. A Bond film is supposed to deliver mayhem and eye candy in exotic locales; Skyfall offers memorable set pieces in Shanghai, Scotland, and an abandoned island factory compound. A Bond film needs gadgets; Skyfall knowingly gives us a personalized Walther and a radio …
In his fourth outing, Daniel Craig's iteration of superspy James Bond takes his undersized suits, hangdog expression, and psychological damage on an epic, eye-popping, worldwide hunt for...closure? (The personal and political are pretty much identical here, and a spectre is, of course, a ghost — the sort of things that …
The inevitable Sylvia Plath biopic. Had it come sooner, the wan, willowy, nasally Gwyneth Paltrow would not have been the inevitable Sylvia Plath. The actress's lack of inner power gives validation to the theory that Plath tended in her poems to exaggerate, to embroider, and to overdramatize on purpose. Of …
The glorified delivery man has been coerced into chauffeuring a freckled Ukrainian redhead to Budapest and beyond, strapped with an irremovable bracelet that will explode if he strays seventy-five feet from his Audi. Jason Statham offers himself up as an alternative to the rougher James Bond of Daniel Craig, together …