A sober but not-quite-somber drone drama that ably portrays the complicated moral calculus involved in modern warfare. (General Sherman said that war is cruelty and there is no use trying to reform it, but there persists the sense that we have to try anyway, especially when we’re firing missiles into …
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir must navigate overwhelming odds, a skeptical cabinet, and a complex relationship with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as millions of lives hang in the balance. Directed by Guy Nattiv, starring Camille Cottin, Helen Mirren, and Liev Schreiber.
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir must navigate overwhelming odds, a skeptical cabinet, and a complex relationship with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as millions of lives hang in the balance. Directed by Guy Nattiv, starring Camille Cottin, Helen Mirren, and Liev Schreiber.
Looking to avoid spoilers? S/he (either Helen Mirren or Ian McKellen) joins a senior dating service under an assumed name, hoping to track down the person who did them wrong sixty years ago. Said person is also hiding behind an alias. But how did they know to join that particular …
From Robert Altman, a pleasant if overlong divertissement that combines the British class-conscious social satire with the dark-and-stormy-night murder mystery: Evelyn Waugh meets Agatha Christie. In short, Altman hell: etiquette, decorum, hierarchy on the one side, and convention, formula, artifice on the other. However much the director might distance himself …
Inspired by actual events, the story tells of a select group of long-term convicts who take up gardening at a progressive English penitentiary, and take it all the way to the annual Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Life-affirming, strong-arming underdog stuff; equally soft-hearted and soft-headed; as cutesy-wootsy and cozy-wozy as …
Instead of following author Stephen Rebello’s fine Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by turning out a procedural on the art of making a masterpiece, Sacha Gervasi (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) gives us a watered-down romcom directed in the style of an episode of Hitchcock Presents. (It’s ostensibly …
Noted down-home small-towners Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey produce traditionally minded director Lasse Hallstrom's (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) film version of Richard Morais' novel about a displaced Indian family ("There was an election of some kind.") who decide to open a restaurant in a French village, right across the …
Discombobulating experience in the vein of The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride, a defense of books framed in the form of an ugly movie. Is the ugliness deliberate? Designed to send a repulsed viewer to the placid regularity of the printed page? The postulate here has to do with …
An elegy on an entire generation -- the one that came of age during the Second World War -- but narrowly focussed on four East London drinking buddies, and most particularly on the two whose friendship dates to the North African theater of the war. The title, from the Booker …
Light sport made of a great figure, Tolstoy in his “eccentric” later years of anti-materialism, nonresistance, celibacy, vegetarianism, or, in short, Tolstoyanism. Under the starry eye of the author’s new secretary, a battle of wills, including a battle over the literal will, boils up between his leading disciple and his …
Computer-animated antifascist children's story of, and for, the birds. A puffed-up heroic epic punctured by self-conscious self-mockery and incomprehensible combat. With the voices of Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Helen Mirren, Abbie Cornish, and Geoffrey Rush; directed by Zack Snyder.
Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren star in this ambling comedy about dementia on board a Winnebago.
"Eric blown to smithereens, Colin carved up, a bomb in my casino -- and you say 'nothing unusual'!" An empire-building British gangster, who envisions himself as the spearhead of London's emergence as the new capitalist capitol of Europe, unwittingly makes an enemy of the Irish Republican Army and is tremendously …
Fact-based tale, despite the name changes from Oscar Bonavena, Sally Burgess, Joe Conforte, and the Mustang Ranch, of a lethal love triangle comprising an Argentinian heavyweight contender and the married partners in a legal brothel outside of Reno. It seems a subject made to order for the screen, though you …