Inflated, arty, but satisfactory reworking of an old gangster-film formula. The sense of raising the bar (in the fashionable phrase) seems quite ostentatious at the outset, with its unmistakable evocation of The Godfather. These are Irish gangsters instead of Italian, and they are gathered for a wake instead of a …
Walt Disney spent over 20 years of his life struggling to bring author P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins to the screen. As if the story behind the making of Uncle Walt’s greatest commercial success didn’t provide enough fodder to craft a compelling narrative, screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith squander …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …
An outrageous bluff which no thinking man, much less any card-carrying cynic, can let pass unchallenged. The germ of the idea -- an eight-year-old boy in Seattle places a call to a nationwide radio psychologist on behalf of his widowed father, and a newspaperwoman in Baltimore, along with thousands of …
Tom Hanks, for the third time under director Steven Spielberg, as a monolingual visitor from abroad, forced to make a temporary home for himself in the International Transit Lounge at JFK Airport (amid numberless corporate plugs: Hugo Boss, Borders, Sbarro, etc.) when a military coup unsettles his fictitious homeland of …
Tom Hanks's bow as writer-director, a rock musical in regressive pursuit of early-Beatles innocence, simplicity, pep, cheer, and other illusory or evanescent states. For all its relative smallness and modesty -- relative, for pertinent examples, to Forrest Gump and to Apollo 13 -- the movie gives off a glow of …
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 …
From Disney, the self-proclaimed First Fully Computer-Animated Feature Film: reason enough to disdain it on general principle. Reason in particular, and in plenty, is provided by the horrible forms of the figures -- closer to Puppetoons, Claymation, Gumby, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and the Pillsbury Doughboy than to the Disney family of …
From Disney, the self-proclaimed First Fully Computer-Animated Feature Film: reason enough to disdain it on general principle. Reason in particular, and in plenty, is provided by the horrible forms of the figures -- closer to Puppetoons, Claymation, Gumby, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and the Pillsbury Doughboy than to the Disney family of …
A sure bet to be enjoyed by all who enjoyed the first one. And endured by most others. The central theme of the built-in obsolescence of children's toys -- Woody, the pull-string cowboy, has suffered a torn shoulder and is retired to the shelf while his owner goes off to …
The second sequel adds little but minutes to the previous one, and for a computer-animated children’s film it adds quite a lot of those, somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and five. In specific, the new 3-D adds little (but four dollars of admission) to the prevailing depth of …
If your kids turned out even slightly well-adjusted, chances are two pop culture icons deserve credit with an assist: Fred Rogers and Charles Schulz. The former has already been galvanized on film, and until Tom Hanks gets around to playing Charlie Brown’s papa, this will have to do. As a …