Filmmaker Anthony Minghella rounds up a cast from past Anthony Minghella films, Jude Law from Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ray Winstone from Cold Mountain only, Juliette Binoche from The English Patient, Juliet Stevenson from Truly Madly Deeply, plus new recruits Robin Wright Penn and, in an entertaining …
Glossy women’s film, playing facilely on our sympathies: a Bangladeshi Muslim shipped off to London, at an early age, for an arranged marriage to an oppressive older fatso, eventually courted as she deserves by a hunky young political activist. Nine-Eleven comes along to broaden the horizons further. With Tannishtha Chatterjee, …
The children's story by Katherine Paterson brings together two junior-high pariahs, a picked-on "artistic" farmboy, solitary brother of four sisters, and a new girl next door, imaginative daughter of two novelists, and sends them off into a woodsy fantasyland of their own making, across the creek on a rope swing. …
A feel-good death trip, directed by the crowd-coddling Rob Reiner, about two terminal cancer patients, a billionaire WASP and a blue-collar black, who bond as hospital roommates and set out together to do the things and see the sights they never had time for: skydive, car-race, get a tattoo, visit …
Sisterhood in the repressive society of Beirut: an Other Woman, a defiled fiancée, a closet lesbian, an aging actress, a lonesome seamstress, a demented bag lady, all in orbit around a second-class beauty shop called Si Bella (the “B” hanging upside down on the façade, the electricity prone to outages). …
With this, Woody Allen looks like he has overextended his stay in England. The refreshment is gone. Less engrossing than Match Point, less engaging than Scoop, it spins a yarn of working-class brothers (Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, working their thespian tails off) who, in exchange for financial favors from a …
Romantic seriocomedy to do with a scheduled wedding turned funeral and the stranded bride's posthumous discovery that her intended groom had a secret big bank account and a secret small child. (They had seemed such a perfect couple: she's called Gray, he was called Grady.) If writer and director Susannah …
Didactic poli-sci lesson on How the System Works, entertainingly illustrated by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols. The titular war is the one between the Soviets and the Afghans in the Reagan era, and Charlie Wilson is a nonfictional Texas congressman (played with supreme complacency by Tom Hanks) who, …
Dead End Kids on Dead End Hill, high above the beaches of Rio, a boil-down of a Brazilian TV series. Any resemblance to City of God is not strictly incidental. (Fernando Meirelles, the director of that other City, worked as co-producer on this one, directed by Paulo Morelli.) The fashion-conscious …
A true ... ish story about a British con man, name of Alan Conway, whose gimmick of passing himself off as the reclusive director of 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, etc., proved to be an effective method of cadging drinks, cruising gay bedmates, eliciting cash. At any rate it …
Ian Curtis has aspirations beyond the trappings of small town life in 1970s England. Wanting to emulate his musical heroes, such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop, he joins a band, and his musical ambition begins to thrive. Soon though, the everyday fears and emotions, that fuel his music, slowly …
Stefan Ruzowitsky’s Holocaust survival tale, loosely based on fact, tells how “the world’s best counterfeiter” (the long, long face of Karl Markovics) eases his existence in a Nazi concentration camp by suppressing his scruples and aiding the German war effort, speedily mastering the British pound, but then dilly-dallying over the …
Annual family gathering (parlor games, touch football, talent show), complicated by romantic rivalry: two brothers, a widower with three girls and a reformed womanizer, both smitten by a worldly Frenchwoman. A showcase for Steve Carell's self-consciousness, somewhat more sympathetic than Dane Cook's luggishness. Juliette Binoche looks as if she could …
One thing to be said for a Wes Anderson film, and it's no small thing, is that it bears an individual stamp. A stamp as flat as a postage stamp, as emphatic as a rubber stamp. (Whap, whap.) A well-known commodity after Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life …
The title is too harsh. The comedy doesn't die, it just labors, as a funeral at a country estate turns to fiasco and farce, beginning with the delivery of the wrong cadaver and escalating with a bottle of mislabelled hallucinogens. Matthew MacFadyen, Keeley Hawes, Alan Tudyk, Daisy Donovan, Rupert Graves, …