Woody Allen at his most exhausted and self-parodying. A philosophy professor (a begutted Joaquin Phoenix) — newly arrived for the summer session at a quaint Rhode Island college, and bored with himself, philosophy, and life in general — finds inspiration in the notion of directly, concretely making the world a …
What’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? The headquarters of the Bureau of Sexological Investigation, a non-existent but factual-sounding organization designed by husband and wife comedy team Jeanne and Alan Abel for this early entrant in the mockumentary market. A parody of Mondo movies, this hit at around the same time the …
Edward Norton, making his directorial debut, shares screen time with Ben Stiller in the roles of boyhood pals who've gone separate but parallel ways -- priest and rabbi -- as hip, happening, new, now, popular, popularizing, palm-slapping types of clergymen. In short, "the God Squad." Then the Third Musketeer from …
The real Scott Davidson, Pete’s father, was a New York firefighter and first-responder who died in 2001 when the World Trade Center collapsed around him. Anyone familiar with his son’s Comedy Central appearances knows how many dark laughs Pete has milked out of being left fatherless at age seven. Those …
Arnold Schwarzenegger being a good sport and making fun of himself. But as a manufacturer of fun the movie has the same limitations as, only on a larger scale than, the Schwarzenegger torso: too grotesquely pumped-up, bulging, strained, top-heavy to produce an effect of "lightness." And in making fun of …
Cute-kid comedy. Number-one cutie is Christina Vidal, a Brooklyn pickpocket who, after getting discovered by (i.e., picking the pocket of) a talent scout on a street corner, becomes the Sunburst Cookie girl. Michael J. Fox counts as a cutie too, a former child actor who hasn't quit acting cute just …
It commences in the summer of '42 and continues for a period of ten months, the length of stay of two early-teen brothers with their tyrannical grandmother in the wake of their mother's death and while their father is away on business. Uncle Louie, a shady underworld character, drops in …
Woody Allen makes an unexpected retreat, taking along his eyeglasses and neuroses, to Russia of the Napoleonic era and to the social circles charted by Tolstoi, Turgenev, others. He presides over more props, more extras, more budget than ever before (the movie was shot, furthermore, in Paris and Budapest); but …
Tepid romantic comedy, in the New York style. It wants to take up residence in a certain situation, but doesn't want to do the construction work necessary to put it there. The desired situation is a middle-aged Manhattan psychoanalyst becoming amorously obsessed with a twenty-ish patient, and risking everything for …
A group of diverse gays, including a set of Jekyll-and-Hyde twins, convene throughout one summer -- Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day (Act One, Act Two, Act Three) -- in a remote lakeside house such as Chekhov might have coveted, to air their thoughts and feelings ("People are …
The initial situation is quite fertile, grounded as it is in something so nearly universal as the Pygmalion impulse. A fourteen-year-old misfit -- academically "accelerated," a devotee of classical music, a connoisseur but not a collector of insects -- is the first person to lay eyes on the new girl …
A magician (Simon McBurney) asks a lifelong friend and arrogant rival illusionist (Colin Firth) to help debunk a captivating young spiritualist (a regrettably miscast Emma Stone). Set in 1928, there’s bewitchment in production designer Anne Seibel’s ritzy period recreation and Darius Khondji buffed ‘Scope cinematography, but Woody Allen doesn’t have …
Life and love among the literati in New York City, photographed in stiff, heavy, arty black-and-white by Gordon Willis, and flooded with the music of George Gershwin. Woody Allen, having stayed behind the cameras on his Interiors, is back on screen as his own hero. He has evolved less as …
A nosy-neighbor fable about the mounting suspicion that the brand-new widower in the apartment down the hall may also be his wife's murderer. During a routine condolatory visit, the wife next door (Diane Keaton) discovers what looks to be an urn of ashes while searching in the kitchen cabinets for …
Anna Paquin, who gave a great kid’s performance in The Piano, offers a great adolescent performance as Lisa. Bright, snarky, spoiled, and neurotic about her broken family in New York, she drives her decent mom (J. Smith-Cameron) nearly crazy by becoming a drama diva. The cause is her role in …