Same dross, different gender. Danny Ocean’s kid sister Debbie (Sandra Bullock) whiles away a five-year stretch in the pokey by conspiring to knock over the annual Met Gala. Her seven same-sex associates are all assigned one function/trait needed to advance the plot: Rihanna as the spliff-rolling hacker (with the floating …
Same dross, different gender. Danny Ocean’s kid sister Debbie (Sandra Bullock) whiles away a five-year stretch in the pokey by conspiring to knock over the annual Met Gala. Her seven same-sex associates are all assigned one function/trait needed to advance the plot: Rihanna as the spliff-rolling hacker (with the floating …
The "unique personal vision" of Tim Burton comes down here to the burgeoning field of science-fiction graphics: a new illustrated edition of an old familiar classic. (Rather dark and murky illustrations, too, with a forest-primeval feel to deepen the timeless mythicality of it all.) Sure, the ape makeup, to say …
Another illustrated "classic" from the people who gave you The Europeons and The Bostonians: not Henry James this time, but E.M. Forster. The illustrations in this instance are handsome enough, though a little heavy on the starch. They are divided up at intervals by facetious chapter headings, or captions, along …
The Grand-Guignol Broadway musical (words and music by Stephen Sondheim), Tim Burtonized for Hollywood. Which means, among other things (such as less music), a ton-of-bricks production design, an ashen color scheme sometimes edging up to the border of black-and-white (excluding the rivers, lakes, geysers of rich red blood), and the …
A closed-off psychologist, in deference to his father's Last Wish, accompanies the coffin to the scene of a childhood tragedy, where he unburies the past while at the same time treating an enigmatic amnesiac. (The lead role passes back and forth between Guy Pearce and a teenager who looks nothing …
Partly, if not equally, stop-motion animator Mike Johnson's Corpse Bride, a voguishly grotesque kiddie film in which all the characters look like reflections in fun-house mirrors, and the worm-eaten title figure is not appreciably more ghastly than the living. Indeed the netherworld boasts more color, albeit garishly expressionistic, than the …
True to title, it pops up but then lies flat. The memoir of British celebrity-chef Nigel Slater was turned by S.J. Clarkson into this quaint coming-out fable. His perky, retro, storybook styling serves the humor about bad British cuisine, but larger emotional themes go hungry. Oscar Kennedy is boy Nigel …
Closeups, sunlight, and a Victorian setting are of no benefit to Shakespeare's flimsy masquerade of cross-dressing and mistaken sexual identity. The language, naturally, is full of delights, and Helena Bonham Carter does nicely with it, but she's not the one who must wear the mustache. Imogen Stubbs, Nigel Hawthorne, Imelda …
Nick Park's claymation creations -- the crackpot inventor who's "crackers about cheese" and his silent, watchful, wary, undyingly loyal yet healthily skeptical pet pooch -- take their first feature-length excursion, after a nine-year absence from the screen. The just shy of an hour-and-a-half running time is as long as their …
Nick Park's claymation creations -- the crackpot inventor who's "crackers about cheese" and his silent, watchful, wary, undyingly loyal yet healthily skeptical pet pooch -- take their first feature-length excursion, after a nine-year absence from the screen. The just shy of an hour-and-a-half running time is as long as their …
A well-to-do English widow (Helen Mirren), touring Italy, flouts convention and marries a much-younger local (Giovanni Guidelli, looking like the young John Derek), a dentist's son who turns out to be far more conventional than his bride ("This is Italy! Married women do not go wandering around alone!"). This interesting …
British filmmaker Iain Softley has modernized the action of the Henry James novel by a very few years so as to place it more firmly in our own century, but it remains a remote spectacle in dull, drained color. The essential and ever-fresh situation (there was an unimported and updated …
An enterprising ragamuffin (newcomer Kyle Catlett) from Montana (by way of the director’s The City of Lost Children) takes a road trip. Destination: the lost District of Columbia for a Smithsonian gala in his honor. A halcyon maze, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s shrewdly sweet-tempered surreal fantasyland is an eyegasmic saturnalia of expressive …