Nancy Biurski's documentary on the astonishing ballerina affectionately known as Tanny is not quite a great movie: there are a few too many stills, some clunky voiceovers, and an occasionally foray into the lugubrious. But it does tell a great story. Tanny, whose long limbs and angular grace were expansive …
It wasn’t a random act of violence like the ones that hit classrooms with greater frequency, but rather a broken spring of nature. More than 6000 parents whose children perished in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake were inspired by the government to cut their losses and have another one. (Those who …
Few people can be put out with Ingmar Bergman for having not kept his promise that Fanny and Alexander would remain his last movie. Still, Bergman has felt obliged to argue, with perhaps an overrefined sense of integrity, that inasmuch as After the Rehearsal was made originally for Swedish television, …
“New friends at my age mean one thing — more funerals,” scoffs Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki), the matriarch of the Shinoda family, as she attempts to work past the recent death of her husband. If American filmmakers could write characters half as observant and compelling as Hirokazu Koreeda, you’d never again …
Rhinestone heist thriller (a brandished DVD of To Catch a Thief establishes a standard of comparison) about a couple of high-tech jewel thieves in smug retirement in the Islands: "Now the challenge is to find joy in simple things." But then the third of the priceless Napoleon Diamonds, of which …
Isabel (Michelle Williams), the manager of an Indian orphanage, travels to New York to pick up a generous endowment check. She soon learns that the daughter she thought was put up for adoption at birth by her ex Oscar (Billy Crudup) is alive and well and living with her father …
A fair-haired Danish do-gooder at an insolvent Bombay orphanage is summoned against his will to his native Copenhagen on a hat-in-hand fundraising mission, and upon arrival is summoned additionally to the wedding of Mr. Moneybags's daughter. To our surprise (and who else's?), Mrs. Moneybags turns out to be an old …
Or: late-term abortionists are people, too. After Tiller looks at the (very) few doctors in America willing to perform late-term abortions in the aftermath of Dr. George Tiller's murder. From the trailer: "It's guilt no matter which way you go. Guilt if you go ahead and do what we're doing, …
The remake of Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past needn't detain anyone longer than to diagnose it as part of the Hollywood grave-robbing epidemic, and to paint a large red cross outside the theater door. What would seem to have been an untransportable Forties storyline has, as in Body Heat, …
Not too glossy or glossed-over a portrait of Jackie Kallen (a hoarse, coarse, brassy, sassy Meg Ryan), a woman in a man's game, manager of a prizefighter whom she discovered in a brawl with two crackheads: "Reminds me of Marvin Hagler." Not too believable a portrait, nevertheless. Charles S. Dutton, …
Vapid paranoid thriller about mind-control through TV commercials. Surely the ad business, to say nothing of this movie, ought to be on guard against more pertinent and persistent evils than the insertion of subliminal political messages in TV spots for No Sweat anti-perspirant. The name of one of the bit …