Mystical magical musical about the orphaned spawn of an unmarried rock-and-roller and classical cellist, all three reunited through music, under a full moon in Central Park, in the boy's twelfth year. Too gooey to be true. And the synthesis of motley forms of music produces ear-strain on top of credulity-strain. …
The final feature from consummate Japanese animator Satoshi Kon.
To be specific, the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra, an octet costumed in robin’s-egg blue, visiting Israel for the inauguration of an Arab Culture Center, but taking a wrong turn to a sound-alike destination in the middle of nowhere, spending a night, getting to know the locals and vice versa, bridging …
Relationship comedy, high-strung, low-stooping. As a meddlesome mother determined to marry off her third daughter, Diane Keaton is required to be both irritating and irresistible. She half succeeds. First half of the equation only. Although not without a certain slouching charm, Mandy Moore ("Actually, I love to sing") comes in …
The ripening of Miss Jane Austen, fictitiously re-imagined as a type of character in one of her own novels (minus the fairy-tale ending) and proportionately diminished as an artistic genius: a copyist more than a creator. The cast -- Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith, Lucy …
Cute name, even for an overhyped, presold, mega-budget moneymaking machine. (The return of Jerry Seinfeld! -- as leading voice, co-writer, co-producer, and principal drum beater.) Cute is much more than you can say, however, for the spongy, marshmallowy computer-animated honeybees or for the premise that permits them to converse in …
Interesting attempt by the eighty-three-year-old Sidney Lumet to keep up with the Tarantinos, piloting a caper film of back-and-forth time jumps and alternating points of view. The caper itself, a jewelry store stickup, is strictly small-time. "We don't want Tiffany's," the mastermind, a drug-dependent real estate accountant (Philip Seymour Hoffman), …
Computer-animated comic-book transcription of the unloved epic poem of the 8th Century. Director Robert Zemeckis goes even further with the motion-capture technique of The Polar Express, staking out the borderland between live action and cartoon, and throwing in 3-D to boot. Ray Winstone, voicing the dragon-slaying hero, has been prettified …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …
Competitive figure skating gets the Will Ferrell treatment: rough and rude. Banned for life from the men's division, two bitter rivals (the macho Ferrell, the femme Jon Heder) return to the ice through a loophole as the first-ever male pair. The main source of humor is your presumed nervousness about …
Woman who runs with the werewolves. In specific, a young American in Bucharest, where the werewolf, or loup garoux as it is known to French-speaking Romanians, is better understood, properly revered. Any true horror fan should be open to a bit of werewolf revisionism, but this bit of it is …
The Bourne absurdum. It isn't just that Part III in the adventures of the amnesiac superspy adds more ridiculousness. It's that, at these lengths, the ridiculousness multiplies exponentially. More ridiculousness, that is, and more and more ridiculous. (The sentimental soft spots found in Parts I and II are here concentrated …
Distaff Death Wish, though it would not be strictly accurate to say that Jodie Foster is playing Charles Bronson. The emphasis is on her psychological wounds after her fiancé is beaten to death and she herself beaten to death's door -- setting up a take-back-the-night feminist revenge story -- and …
With his follow-up to Shattered Glass, director Billy Ray has made a good start on a pet theme, the human, or peculiarly American, proclivity for deceit. The first, you will recall, told the factual story of the fabricating journalist, Stephen Glass, of The New Republic. This second tells the factual …