Remedial lesson on tolerance: incognito Jew from a Pennsylvania steel town gets an athletic scholarship to a blue-blooded prep school, where everybody loves him until the football season ends and his secret comes out. Set in the 1950s for additional backwardness, and building toward a moral crisis of duncical simplicity, …
A DreamWorks animated feature in the old hand-drawn style: a horse odyssey after the fashion of the thrice-filmed Will James novel, Smoky, with the four-legged hero falling into many hands on his roundabout way home (which looks to be in the vicinity of Monument Valley, nowhere near the vicinity of …
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 inseparable Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, do a comedy about joined-at-the-hip brothers, Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon ("We're not Siamese"). The principal self-revelation to come out of this is something we already knew about them: their taste, if that word may be used in the vicinity of the Farrellys, …
It may be possible — perhaps by squinting and turning your head just so and maybe crossing your eyes a touch — to see why director George Clooney juxtaposes, at a climactic moment, the sick comedic violence of a man finding himself unable to extract his golf club from the …
Serioso. Molto serioso. Not so much a drama as a diagram, didactic in purpose, of the chain-link interconnections, the slow-burn chain reactions, in the Middle Eastern oil trade. What screenwriter Stephen Gaghan did for the illicit drug business in Traffic, he attempts to do again, as both screenwriter and first-time …
Hollywood remake of the first of Patricia Highsmith's five Ripley novels, originally made in France, under the title Purple Noon, forty years earlier. (The remake is done in period: Chet Baker and Charlie Parker are the coolest, man.) Clearly, writer-director Anthony Minghella does not owe his inspiration to a desire …
Science-fiction juvenilia, in Robert Heinlein vein (or for nonreaders, George Lucas vein), about "humanity's last great hope" after the destruction of our planet by the dreaded Dredge in the 31st Century. The self-described "last great hope" is hardly more than a juvenile himself (voice of Matt Damon), and his foremost …
Ben Mee (Matt Damon) leaves print journalism to buy and run a small zoo. Scarlett Johansson, looking safari bronzed, is the main animal keeper. The critters are delightful, and the winsome cast includes infallibly funny Thomas Haden Church, delightful teen Elle Fanning, and adorable mascot Maggie Elizabeth Jones. Drawn from …