Not bad, if you want the 2008 financial collapse reduced to an adrenalized ego showdown in f-wordy debt to David Mamet. Kevin Spacey is the greed pig who squishes best. Jeremy Irons is the predator who heads the investment firm, seeming to welcome disaster with a shark’s appetite. Writer-director J.C. …
Based on the David Henry Hwang play, based on a true story: a young French diplomat in Communist China enters into long-term intimate relations with a Peking Opera star, never realizing "she" is a "he." A story hard to believe -- and John Lone looking jowly and beardy (and sounding …
You'd never guess, from the weight of the thing, that this is one of Shakespeare's comedies -- unless maybe by the device of the woman-disguised-as-a-man and fooling her own husband. Further, the naturalistic acting (faltering delivery, sotto voce, peppered with pauses), the cut-aways to authentic Venice locales, and the drowning-out …
A study of power on a small scale. Four Polish laborers, sans work permits, are in London on a Laurel-and-Hardy construction job, when the military back home cracks down on Solidarity, and the foreman of the crew, the only one of them who speaks English, tries to keep the knowledge …
Steve Martin carries the Inspector Clouseau torch into a sequel, thoroughly doused though the flame may be. (Kevin Kline got out while the getting was good, leaving the role of Clouseau’s superior to John Cleese, with unaltered British accent. And previous director Shawn Levy handed the bag to Harald Zwart.) …
Stephen Hopkins’ account of track and field legend Jesse Owens and the controversy surrounding US participation in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 is overstuffed, muddy-headed, heavy-handed, derivative, and weirdly sanitized — and yet it almost works, because who wouldn’t thrill to see a black man take on Nazi ideology on …
Lurid but not quite trashy thriller from director Francis Lawrence, who puts his Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence through trials that never made it into their previous, PG-13 collaboration. It’s not just the rape and torture — though there is that, along with a nude scene that serves nicely as …
Lurid but not quite trashy thriller from director Francis Lawrence, who puts his Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence through trials that never made it into their previous, PG-13 collaboration. It’s not just the rape and torture — though there is that, along with a nude scene that serves nicely as …
The Claus von Bulow case reopened, with no new reversal of verdict. That was hardly in the cards, since the movie was based on the book by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and human-rights activist who headed von Bulow's appeal and obtained a reversal of the original verdict. So, …
Essentially just Gidget Goes Artistic, notwithstanding the name and reputation of Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris, Sheltering Sky). To an eclectic soundtrack of rock, blues, jazz, classical, and in a Tuscan setting littered with terra-cotta sculptures, paintings, pastels, a nineteen-year-old American virgin spends summer vacation abroad, ostensibly to have …
It has been well publicized that Luchino Visconti was the first filmmaker, some twenty years previous, to have been approached by producer Nicole Stéphane to adapt Proust, and though that arrangement would not be hard to imagine, it is hard to imagine that the outcome would have been as arid …
Remake of the H.G. Wells classic, directed by the novelist's great-grandson, Simon Wells, whose allegiance is plainly to his own time and not to his illustrious ancestor. The special effects are perhaps not too excessive (nor too special), as compared with the current norm rather than with the George Pal …
A lump of unmalleable literariness, extracted from a novel by Graham Swift. We have once again the illusion-shattering device of obviously different actors playing the same character at different ages, a device made doubly intolerable by the continual switching back and forth in time and the fairly equal amounts of …
Those expecting a Jean-Paul Sartre biopic will be disappointed to find instead the uninspired tale of a plagiarist. While honeymooning in Paris, a struggling young writer (Bradley Cooper) discovers a hand-written manuscript hidden inside the battered attache case his wife (Zoe Saldana) finds in an antique store. Five years later, …