Former choreographer Rob Marshall’s third directorial effort, a restaging of the Broadway musical based on Fellini’s 8½. In essence the filmmaker has taken an intensely personal film (so named as it was Fellini’s eighth and a half opus, counting three collaborations as halves) and depersonalized it, trivialized it, into nostalgic …
Two thespian heavyweights, Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, going toe to toe, battling to a draw. The scandal, as it comes to light, is the illicit and illegal affair of a married-with-children, thirty-something art teacher, Blanchett, and a fifteen-year-old male student (Andrew Simpson), a ripped-from-the-headlines affair made perfectly plausible if …
A snooty journalist (Steve Coogan), remiss when it comes to covering human interest stories, rides shotgun on a road trip with a bemused mother (Judi Dench) in search of the son who, decades earlier, was taken from her and sold for adoption by corrupt Irish Catholic nuns. Coogan tries his …
By this time the Jane Austen novel qualifies as a repertory piece, a mettle-test for would-be Darcys and Elizabeth Bennets, little different from Romeo and Juliet. The team behind the present production of it, apart from their attempt to replace the titular conjunction with a dashing ampersand, earn no points …
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 …
Fictionalized commie sympathizer Joan “Granny Spy” Stanley, the KGB’s longest-serving British informer, is here given her own fact-based biopic. The film is strangely reminiscent of the recent role-reversal comedy Little, inasmuch as audiences flocking to see the latest from Judi Dench are bound to be disappointed upon learning that the …
More tales of love and impending death among English retirees in India. This time around, the story is driven by the young proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel), who is simultaneously preparing to marry his fiancee and expand his hospitality empire. His ambition for the latter tends to overshadow his devotion to …
Wouldn't it be fun to think that the Bard suffered from writer's block, that he received a shove from "Kit" Marlowe to get the old plot-ball rolling, that he stole lines from soap-box orators, that he was rewriting his deathless dialogue daily during rehearsals, that one of the actors in …
From the E. Annie Proulx novel about a widower named Quoyle who returns with his daughter Bunny to his Newfoundland roots, and becomes (among other things) the ace reporter on a local rag called The Gammy Bird. A tall tale, a dark tale, a droll tale, arch, sardonic, grotesque, gaudy, …
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 …
A welcome development: big-screen luminaries (Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, Keira Knightley, Tom Hiddleston, et. al.) lending their luster to the short-film form. At their best, short films function like short stories, trimming away every excess to deliver aesthetic completion in a fraction of the time. It's a difficult …
Decidedly weak tea (and not so hot, either), with filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli holding forth from the head of the table as a rambling raconteur, remembering the days of his youth among the artsy English ladies of pre-war and mid-war Florence ("I've warmed both hands before the fires of Botticelli and …
Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins invite the cameras to join them for several of their regular afternoon teas as they reminisce about their more than fifty years of friendship — from their modest beginnings to their years of taking home awards by the carload — and …
Toward the end of her life, Queen Victoria — the Empress of India, despite never having set foot in that country — took an interest in, and eventually befriended, a young Indian clerk sent to attend her golden jubilee. Her Majesty (played here with magnificent, exhausted humanity by Judi Dench) …
Agent 007, for a change, gets a "real" director, Michael Apted, which is to say a director with some creditable credits to his name, Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorky Park, the documentary 28 Up. But what's the use when he's still to be held to a formula requirement like the ever …