The once proud Dustin Hoffman, with a prissy lisp, bushy eyebrows, shrubby hair, and ice-cream suits, as the centuries-old proprietor of a magic toyshop: crushed under a riot of color and a steamroller of whimsy. With Natalie Portman, Jason Bateman, and Zach Mills; written and directed by Zach Helm.
The first American film of Wong Kar-wai and the acting debut of pop singer Norah Jones proves to be an event less than momentous. The Hong Kong director has no doubt brought along a vision, confined as it largely is to café, diner, bar, and casino, dressed up with sufficient …
Paris, Je T'Aime crosses the pond. A multi-director box on bonbons, undeveloped little vignettes of male-female relations in the Big Apple. The ghostly segment by Shekhar Kapur stands out from the rest for stylistic reasons, the pallid palette, the persnickety compositions, the oval mirror frame within the frame. Natalie Portman, …
The opening wit is “Can I finger you?” Next are the oral sex jokes, penis jokes, condom jokes, and the many meet-cutes of Natalie Portman (who opts for sex only) and Ashton Kutcher (who will take whatever he can get). Kutcher, who cannot act, takes his clothes off frequently. Portman …
Another installment in the long-running royal soap opera. Think of it as Elizabeth: The Genesis, an hysterical-historical story of court intrigue, concentrating heavily, and heavy-breathingly, on bedroom intrigue, the sibling rivalry over the affections of Henry VIII. The “other” Boleyn girl, as she is self-described in the dialogue, turns out …
Luc Besson, of La Femme Nikita and The Big Blue, finally comes to America in body besides spirit: to New York, in specific, for an action yarn, or yawn, about a milk-drinking, plant-nurturing, granny-sunglasses-wearing existential French hitman who initiates a barely pubescent orphan girl into the trade. The director's alienness …
The long-awaited (by some) prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, and such a letdown as to make you feel almost sorry for George Lucas, poor little rich boy. Even moviegoers who have never attended a foreign film in their lives are apt to be aware that Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden …
The saga grinds on, in state-of-the-art digital video: crisp and detailed yet somewhat overcast, monotoned, seemingly covered in a sort of pinkish-complected skin, like an unboiled wiener. The particulars -- the diminished role of the reviled Jar-Jar Binks; the teen romance between Queen Padmé (now known as Senator Amidala) and …
George Lucas closes the circle: the last of the three prequels, evenly spaced out at three-year intervals. (The filmmaker's latter-day visual style comes back to us in a twinkling: the flatness of the humans and the overfertilized fluorescence of their computer-generated surroundings, something like sticks of wood in a stop-motion …
The long-awaited (by some) prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, and such a letdown as to make you feel almost sorry for George Lucas, poor little rich boy. Even moviegoers who have never attended a foreign film in their lives are apt to be aware that Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden …
Natalie Portman directs and stars in her treatment of Amos Oz's memoir about being a child in the nascent nation of Israel.
Director Kenneth Branagh almost manages a comic-book marriage of heaven and earth. Heaven, or rather Asgard, is full of mystical sci-fi, portentous speech, and world-shattering drama. Earth, meanwhile, provides comic relief and a forum for personal matters: character building, falling in love, etc. Both the visuals and the acting have …
Comic-book adaptation, or "graphic-novel" adaptation, about an avenging superhero hidden behind the stiff grin of a Guy Fawkes mask: a kind of Frankensteinian composite pieced together of Zorro (the black hat and cape, the revolutionary politics, the carving of his initial on his handiwork), Blade (the adeptness with cutlery, the …
Southern-fried chick flick. Seventeen-year-old Novalee Nation, westbound and pregnant, is superstitious about fives (her ma ran out on the fifth of the month; it took fifty-five stitches to close her steak-knife wound; etc.), so when the cashier at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart rings up her change at $5.55, she knows for …