The multiplex air conditioner pooped out halfway through, occasioning an early exit. Part of me was thrilled, but there’s this completist in me who hates not seeing a movie through to the end, particularly when the decision to leave was not my own. I should have thanked the gods of …
The adaptation of the earliest and not least ambitious John Grisham potboiler, about a Mississippi black man on trial for the double murder of his ten-year-old daughter's rapists, bundles up the author's fairy-tale articles of faith (the luck of the beginner, the ascension of the underdog, the might of right) …
Two cuties, Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, battling to a draw (i.e., happily ever after), in the roles of an "environmental warrior" and a "philandering robber baron," more prosaically a community-activist attorney and a Trump-like urban developer. The glowing photography by Laszlo Kovacs has greater gravity: way beyond cute, really …
Better thought of as The Reappearing. George Sluizer's remake — and travesty — of his own 1988 thriller is nothing so much as a monument to American provincialism and ethnocentrism: if it isn't in English, it can't be a real movie. Never mind that it was a perfectly good movie, …
A romantic comedy of misunderstanding: the token-taker has an unspoken crush on a daily commuter, rescues him from an onrushing el train after a mugging, and is mistaken for his fiancé as he lies comatose in the hospital. Then she meets his brother. A possible premise, drudgingly written, directed, and …