Hal Needham's salute to Hollywood stuntmen is in the Howard Hawks mode of This Special Breed male camaraderie movies. Needham, a celebrated stuntman and stunt coordinator himself, knows what he's talking about, and he seems to be drawing from a fairly deep well of feelings. Even his glib ridicule of …
Noted down-home small-towners Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey produce traditionally minded director Lasse Hallstrom's (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) film version of Richard Morais' novel about a displaced Indian family ("There was an election of some kind.") who decide to open a restaurant in a French village, right across the …
Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg rejoin forces, nineteen years later, for a fourth archaeological adventure. Ford, with his big-cat purr of a voice, remains an amiable fellow; and if he’s a bit jowlier beneath that crumpled face (like a wadded-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and mostly smoothed …
The third Indiana Jones adventure, and more or less what you'd expect. Perhaps a little less, in that this is the most blithely comical of them, with the hero's father filling the bill of comic-relief character actor. Of course we hardly needed any added relief in what is already an …
One of the rare late-period Godard films to be circulated commercially over here. Why this one? Virtually -- or maybe we should say virtuously -- void of narrative (something to do with memory, history, and a fictitious filmmaker's inchoate project on love and the ages of man), arid, abstemious, prickly, …
How to cope with a rogue shark, who’s choosing his meals among the summertime beachgoers on a New England vacation isle, is a possibly plausible crisis, puffed up however to the proportions of a whopping fish story. The plot appears to be fooling with some fairly advanced chemistry (the hunting …
Elementary and elemental spectacle of ravening dinosaurs and edible humans. Beyond that, it pretty much eludes criticism or comment. A small objection might be raised at the way dinosaurs, for live-action purposes (which is to say live-action humans, but computer-generated dinosaurs), have become the monopoly of the Jurassic Park franchise. …
Director Colin Trevorrow dumps out his Steven Spielberg Family Thriller Kit and makes sure all the pieces are there: squabbling siblings (young and old!), divorce, kids in peril, endearing childlike wonder vs. the threat posed by self-serving grownups, moral musings on science and nature, and oh yes, dinosaurs. Lots and …
Golly, maybe life really will find a way, even in a franchise whose last installment played like a zombified version of the original entry from Steven Spielberg. Director J.A. Bayona’s most recent feature was titled A Monster Calls, and featured a child dealing with painful news about his mother. Bayona …
Holocaust horror stories, principally those of five Hungarians, now Americans, who survived the accelerated genocide of the final year of the war. A pedestrian documentary technique -- a standard mix of interviews, archive footage, family photos, etc. -- is given a lift by the potency of the subject, and by …
Four score and 150 minutes ago, Steven Spielberg shifted into his John Ford mode with this giant, myth-bolstering Golden Book of a movie. As the Civil War rages on, we open with a moment lifted from Saving Private Ryan: a shorter, but equally anonymous massacre. Inasmuch as it fails to …
Nipponese bodice-ripper, from the best-seller by Arthur Golden, though it plays as if it could just as well have been by Danielle Steel, a Cinderella story of the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of a blue-eyed geisha in pre-war and postwar Japan. "A story like mine," …
A Steven Spielberg vision of the future, via Philip K. Dick, with a legitimate science-fictional idea in it. The idea has to do with an experimental crime-prevention unit in Washington, D.C., in the mid-21st Century -- the Department of Pre-Crime -- whose task is to stop the murders foreseen by …
Getting off on the right foot is vital to a comedy, much more so than to a tragedy, which can afford to put off making you feel miserable. This one -- a comedy, one surmises, about a young couple's travails in fixing up a million-dollar dream house -- starts out …