In the directorial debut of playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Five Corners), there are several eye-widening romantic visions: a Manhattan city block lit up like a literal Christmas tree; the spreading sunrise on a California beach; a yacht bedecked with Chinese lanterns under a crescent moon. That sort …
Potential sponsors looked upon Richard Williams (Will Smith) as just another tennis-father, a man whose pride and determination blinded him to the likelihood his daughters Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) had a better chance of managing a Dick’s Sporting Goods than they did becoming the reigning Queens of …
The Coen brothers' first-ever "unoriginal" work: a remake of a mid-Fifties British caper comedy by the underappreciated Alexander Mackendrick. In mitigation, the brothers throughout their careers have been so partial to the pastiche -- the neo-noir Blood Simple, the imitation-Hammett Miller's Crossing, the imitation-Cain The Man Who Wasn't There, the …
Tom Hanks cowrote, directed, and stars in this novel pleasantry about a 50-something, all-too-amiable employee of the month. Hanks’s title character is fired at the film’s outset for his lack of education, prompting him to enroll in community college. Enter Julia Roberts as a frustrated speech professor in the midst …
Glistening vein of ore uncovered in sports history: the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed when the boys were away for World War II, and continuing for ten years after the inaugural year chronicled here. Unhappily, the pickaxe is in the hands of Penny Marshall, with her penchant for forced …
Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks) is a grump who no longer sees purpose in his life following the loss of his wife. Otto is ready to end it all, but his plans are interrupted when a lively young family moves in next door, and he meets his match in quick-witted Marisol. …
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 …
The year is 1870. Civil War veteran Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) is a news-reader, a nascent member of the broadcast news media, traveling from town to town with a stack of newspapers in his valise, looking to keep American abreast of current events at a dime a head. …
Ambitious seriocomedy about the father-son relationship of a diabetic Willy Loman and an ad-agency whiz kid. (Ambitious, at least, for the TV mentality of director Garry Marshall.) The "live" presentation of a possible TV spot to a potential airline client is charming, or anyway the woman on guitar is charming. …
Confused-teen-crazy-world comedy, fairly formulaic (a gallery of stereotypes, a splash of gross-out, a dab of sentiment, an instructive moral), notwithstanding the genuflections to Fine Literature. Agile comic turns by Jack Black, Catherine O'Hara, Lily Tomlin, and John Lithgow. But the romantic leads, Colin Hanks and Schuyler Fisk, bear so strong …
For an encore to his Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme offers an olive branch to the homosexual protesters of his depiction therein of a serial killer. His atonement takes the form of a courtroom drama about the wrongful-termination suit of an AIDS-afflicted yuppie lawyer and closet gay: a talking-heads …
Neither an "instant classic" nor the polar opposite, but a middling addition to the holiday repertoire: computerized illustrations of the Chris Van Allsburg children's book about a little boy already too old to believe in Santa ("This is your crucial year"), snatched out of his bed on Christmas Eve for …
Characters speak across office desks and restaurant dining tables as Janusz Kaminski’s camera lackadaisically encircles them in what could be Steve Spielberg’s stagiest work to date. And not since 1941 has the director slathered on the comic relief with such a leaden hand. Meryl Streep is superb as usual playing …
Writer and director David Seltzer throws a thimbleful of cold water onto the business of the stand-up comic: taking the laughing-on-the-outside-crying-on-the-inside cliché, wrapping it in some psychoanalytic cheesecloth, and running with it (in no very purposeful direction) for two full hours. And with the other hand he pitches him a …
Child-abuse instruction smothered in sap: the story-time narration of Tom Hanks, the Wishing Spot, the Secret Hiding Cubbyhole Place, the Pinky Promise, the Anti-Monster Brew, the giant talking buffalo from dreamland (voice of Ben Johnson), and what's christened "the big idea" -- a homemade flying machine assembled from a little …