Although the Dan Brown novel was written before The Da Vinci Code, the screen adaptation of it (directed again by Ron Howard) takes care to situate itself afterwards with a reference or two to the returning hero’s “recent involvement with, shall we say, Church mysteries” and his consequent strained relations …
Films have previously depicted the plight of an individual in the wake of a terrorist bombing, but never a character with Down syndrome. After the real-life 1994 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires separates Anita (Alejandra Manzo) from her doting mother (Norma Aleandro), the developmentally disabled young woman …
The reclusive author (Jeff Daniels) of the best-selling Me and God, cornering “ten percent of the God market,” slowly yet suddenly comes out of his shell at the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication. Writer and director John Hindman, owing a good deal to As Good As It Gets (although …
Art-house schlock from Danish director Lars von Trier, sort of Ingmar Bergman meets Rob Zombie, or in other words scab-picker gone full-bore mutilator. It tells of a grieving couple who repair to a lonely cabin in the Northwest woods — a spot Biblically, ironically, caustically called Eden — to work …
Sacha Gervasi’s wily documentary on an obscure Canadian metal band, still sticking together and struggling for acceptance twenty years past their stumpy peak. It would no doubt have brought to mind Rob Reiner’s rock mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, even had the drummer in Anvil not been named Robb Reiner, …
“There’s no bad guys, only good guys”: an inside job among armored-car guards, thoroughly and lethally botched. Compact caper film, all business, worked out with an overabundance of closeups and occasional cracks in credibility. With Columbus Short, Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, and Fred Ward; directed by …
A little doodle by Jacques Rivette to do with a capricious Italian tagalong (Sergio Castellitto) of a French travelling circus and in particular of a haunted older woman in the troupe (Jane Birkin, looking like turning into Mick Jagger). If only because it clocks in at under an hour and …
Documentarist Don Argott relates the story, with the aid of a roundtable of talking heads, of what happened to the Barnes Foundation, specifically its collection of post-Impressionist and early modern art, after the death of the philanthropic Philadelphia pharmaceutical king, Albert C. Barnes. The paintings, expressly intended never to be …
Ambitious merger of live action and computer animation, with at least one groundbreaking 3-D effect: English subtitles for the language spoken on the celestial body of Pandora inserted on a plane in the middle distance between a foreground figure and an upstage figure, as if the foreground one could look …
Ambitious merger of live action and computer animation, with at least one groundbreaking 3-D effect: English subtitles for the language spoken on the celestial body of Pandora inserted on a plane in the middle distance between a foreground figure and an upstage figure, as if the foreground one could look …
Ambitious merger of live action and computer animation, with at least one groundbreaking 3-D effect: English subtitles for the language spoken on the celestial body of Pandora inserted on a plane in the middle distance between a foreground figure and an upstage figure, as if the foreground one could look …
Director Sam Mendes travels the sunnier side of Revolutionary Road, travels it, together with a playful, lovey-dovey, loosey-goosey couple expecting their first child and looking for a spot to put down roots, to Phoenix, to Tucson, to Madison, to Montreal, to Miami, evoking little sense of place anywhere outside of …
Nearly but not quite a remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant of 1992, at the very least a relocation of it from the Big Apple to the Big Easy, perhaps simply a variation on a theme — all the same kinds of badness, drugs, gambling, prostitutes, a blind eye to …
Squeaky-clean teen musical culminating in a battle of the high-school rock bands. The music competition proves to be a bit less intense and thorny than the romantic competition, but nothing, either way, that can’t be smoothed out amicably by the final curtain. In the hands of director Todd Graff and …