This follows the -- or a -- standard operating procedure for science fiction: start from a base of reality, the more au courant the better, and take off on a logical extension of no matter what length. The base of reality here is Virtual Reality. "Falling, Floating, and Flying," summarizes …
Romantic-comic trifle to do with two divorce lawyers of opposite sexes locking horns in the courtroom and bumping uglies in the bedroom. In essence, it asks Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore to be Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Moore is enough of an actress to respond to the challenge, however …
A Danish cancer patient (Trine Dyrholm) catches her husband diddling a co-worker two days before they’re set to leave for their daughter’s Italian wedding. In the eyes of the audience, that frees her up to undertake an affair with her kid’s future father-in-law (Pierce Brosnan). A supposedly heartwarming comedy that …
The Catherine Johnson stage musical brought to the screen under its stage director, Phyllida Lloyd: a romantic-comic bauble about a scheduled wedding on a Greek island, to which the bride-to-be, unknown to her mother, has invited the three men who are sole candidates to be her biological father. (All three …
Tepid adaptation of a classic John Bingham thriller, Five Roundabouts to Heaven, moved to America, but kept in the post-WWII period, and instilled with a modern condescension to the past, along with a modern irony, drollery, jadedness. The casting and playing of Pierce Brosnan and Chris Cooper tip off the …
Tim Burton's sniggering hommage to grade-B science fiction. Hordes of computer-animated Little Green Men with big heads and exposed brains, reminiscent of the aliens in This Island Earth, annihilate the majority of the big-name cast (including Jack Nicholson in two roles, Glenn Close, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Danny DeVito, …
Smarty-pants comedy-thriller written and directed by Richard Shepard. Pierce Brosnan, producer and star, further purges himself of James Bond (if The Tailor from Panama didn't do the trick) in his garish portrayal of "a facilitator of fatalities" who befriends a timid American businessman on a job in Mexico: "For an …
Streisand the star has so enslaved Streisand the director that she -- the latter -- is no longer free to make the movie that cries out faintly to be made. That movie perhaps already did get made, in France, in the late Fifties, by André Cayatte, under the same name …
Neither a remake of the turgidly depressing John Huston neo-western with Nick Cannon in the role originated by Montgomery Clift, nor a return to form by once-prospering action director Renny Harlin (Born American, Die Hard 2). It starts well enough, with narrator Ringo (Cannon) informing us that of the 19,000 …
A potentially risky project for director Bruce Beresford. After he'd just done a piece about the docile Negro servant of the American South (Driving Miss Daisy), he now does one about the West African native who takes up the White Man's Burden more ardently than the colonial white man: "I …
Robin Williams, that thickset, hirsute Peter Pan, has hit upon another way not to grow up. He's an out-of-work actor and specialist in "voices" (Porky Pig, James Bond, Nicholson, Reagan, etc.), whose life-is-a-party antics finally get old with his wife of fourteen years, and who's booted out of the house. …
Fresh in from Texas, Superdad Owen Wilson and the family arrive “somewhere in Asia” just in time to celebrate Kill All Americans Day. Fine sleight of hand work on the pre-credit sequence promptly sails headlong into a Xenophobic, effects-laden thrill ride, minus the superhero costumes. Pierce Brosnan, in a brief …
The emergency-room patient, who looks like a derelict but turns out to be an anthropologist, is bleeding profusely and babbling in French. Before he expires, he infects the attending physician, so to speak, with his most recent memories. These are an awful legacy. The man has encountered something far more …
After parting ways with the 007 franchise, Pierce Brosnan continues to outsource James Bond in a modish manner that should make Daniel Craig’s blue eyes green with envy. The November Man follows Tailor of Panama and The Matador with this rip-snorting tale of a high level CIA official who drops …
With a depressive bipolar mother (Cynthia Nixon) and a father who stands gelid and forever unconfronted (Pierce Brosnan), it’s no wonder their recently spurned, curly-haired nebbish of a son (Callum Turner) rebounds with the old man’s mistress (Kate Beckinsale). It’s a New York-based romance told in reverse-angles from Marc Webb …