Two guiltless fugitives (brothers-in-law: the married one's surname is Husband) fall into the sympathetic clutches of Dr. Chilblains, a cryonics crackpot who takes them out of their difficulties by flash-freezing them. They are awakened twenty-nine years later to different difficulties, in 1991. The debatable decision to make both men dimwits …
A magician (Simon McBurney) asks a lifelong friend and arrogant rival illusionist (Colin Firth) to help debunk a captivating young spiritualist (a regrettably miscast Emma Stone). Set in 1928, there’s bewitchment in production designer Anne Seibel’s ritzy period recreation and Darius Khondji buffed ‘Scope cinematography, but Woody Allen doesn’t have …
Maddeningly slow remake of Death Takes a Holiday, at more than twice the length of the 1934 version. There is a shocking special effect early on, when that darling Brad Pitt, right in front of our eyes, without apparent edits, gets bounced around between two cars in a crosswalk. (This …
The third Frank Darabont film to have been adapted from the works of Stephen King, although the first two, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, were not the sort of work for which that author is best known. (Darabont's intervening film, The Majestic, was truly horrible, horrific, horrid, but …
Julia Roberts, her two-ton ego, and her tapering tusklike head, in the part of a "forward-thinker" who travels east from Oakland State to her dream job at Wellesley, there to impart Art History platitudes and feminist fundamentals to the future homemakers in the Class of '54, and to lock horns …
Clint Eastwood's somber meditation on chance, fate, doom; scarred souls and endless repercussions; violence begetting violence. Just as Unforgiven was an act of penance for body counts in his Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns as well as in his self-directed imitation Leones (High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider), …
It seems a safe bet that Ed Harris would not have been interested in directing himself in the role of the leading light of American Action Painting (notwithstanding his uncanny resemblance to him from the eyebrows up) unless the painter were also a violent alcoholic who could be counted upon …
TV news bulletin: a terrorist bomb has blown up a Marine headquarters in the Sinai, where one of the seven Springer brothers is stationed. The other six of them rally round the Springer matriarch, together with one girlfriend and the estranged husband and father, to await the casualty report. The …
Clint Eastwood's forty-sixth starring role is a sufficiently proper and plausible one for an actor of seventy years of age. Or anyway it has been made sufficiently so. Ample thought and talk have gone into the script to persuade us that Eastwood and no one else on earth can fix …
First-time director Lee David Zlotoff, a TV veteran who is at pains to avoid identification as such, puts up a respectable semblance of serious filmmaking, for a while at least. His work here is careful and well-crafted, with fine attention to points of view, fields of view, as in the …
Leslie Nielsen, the patriarch of zany, in a decades-late takeoff on James Bond, with sideswipes ranging from Home Alone to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A couple of flashback jokes stand out from the numbing fusillade of other jokes as jewels of intelligence and ingenuity. In one, we flash …
Schmaltzy, preachy, pushy comedy on the subject of second chances and fresh starts. A Jewish widow gets "picked up at her own husband's funeral" by a gate-crashing Italian who has loved her from afar for twenty-odd years. The Italian is the movie's biggest problem, partly because the role is cast …
Timid political comedy in which the ex-President -- "the most popular in history," despite being the first to be divorced in office -- faces off against a hardware-store owner over the mayoralty of a Maine small town. But the real bone of contention is the hardware man's dangling girlfriend. The …
Petite, apathetic Ellen Page finds a new calling — as "Babe Ruthless — in the rough-and-tumble of Austin roller derby, leading to a calendar conflict between the championship game and, her mother's dearest dream, the Bluebonnet Beauty Pageant. Drew Barrymore, who plays a minor supporting part, takes to the director's …