A loving, generous, somewhat sedate portrait of the artist as a successful old man. So much of Alison Chernik’s Itzhak Perlman documentary is contained in the opening scene, wherein the great violinist dons a personalized Mets jersey (the common touch), backs his scooter out of a specialized van (the physical …
A wise film from director Hirokazu Koreeda, one that knows kids for what they are: not miniature adults, not the masters of their own magical kingdoms, but newcomers struggling to navigate by their own imperfect charts. Twelve-year-old Koichi dreams of reuniting his divorced parents -- the pain of his family’s …
A pretty, slightly precious punk trifle with blood on its white tux jacket. Writer-director Christian Papierniak’s debut feature about a young woman desperate to traverse Los Angeles so she can crash the engagement party of her ex and ex-best friend has charm, thanks in large part to the charisma of …
A film about the perils of success. Watch Al Pacino do his damnedest to shed his legacy (and goof on his beloved Shakespeare while he’s at it). Watch Adam Sandler take the lash to himself for getting rich via crass hackwork. Watch them both pretend that what they really want …
"A Tom Cruise Production" —it's the first thing you see on the screen, and it's all there is to know. Here, he plays Jack Reacher, an invincible, invisible genius who appears out of the mists of cliche to investigate a rogue sniper's shooting spree. (The opening scene, in which a …
More like Jack Creaker, amirite? Yeah, it’s a lousy joke, but then, it’s a lousy movie, and lousy or not, it’s a propos: dated, silly, and more than a little bit cheap. Tom Cruise returns to his embodiment of a mid-century American masculine fantasy: an ex-military superman who’s gotta ramble, …
Disappointing, but only because it manages to raise hopes in the first place. Journeyman director Kenneth Branagh (Henry V, Thor) does his level best to give us a small-scale story with large-scale consequences — you know, characters we care about, a situation of some importance, and a few gadgets and …
Paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey wanted to study chimpanzees in the wild in order to better understand the life of early man. He chose his pretty English secretary Jane Goodall for the project, in part because she had “a mind unbiased by scientific thinking,” and thank the stars he did, because she …
What happens when “complicated” gives way to “convoluted.” It’s 10 years since super-amnesiac CIA super-agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) learned the awful truth that he volunteered to become a mindless government assassin, and now he is living off the grid, tortured by guilt and punching people for money. Only maybe …
Lydia Tenaglia’s alternately dreamy and gossipy documentary about celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower is heavy on the “celebrity” and frustratingly short on the “chef.” Yes, it’s probably worth knowing that his hard-partying, world-traveling, deeply neglectful parents left him alone for extended periods, such that he spent a lot of time in …
Old man (Clint Eastwood, 84) makes movie about old musical group (Frankie Valli, 80, and The Four Seasons) and manages to keep the whole enterprise from getting either stiff in the joints or whiffy with nostalgia. It's a neat piece of work, accomplished partly through the risky trick of having …
The issue is the opening of a Carmelite convent in Auschwitz — Catholic nuns and symbols in "the biggest Jewish cemetery in the world." The nuns see it as honoring Edith Stein, a Jewish convert who became a Carmelite and died in the camp. The Polish Pope John Paul II …
A good time for people who think that failed attempts at greatness are more fun to recount than successful ones. In telling the story of how he almost managed to make the movie version of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune, cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky comes off as an alternately charming …
When documentarian Julien Faraut finds an enormous trove of film footage taken of hotheaded tennis great John McEnroe at the French Open — footage shot for a series of innovative instructional films that examined the play of particular stars — he’s sure he’s got something. But what? An exploration of …