The follow-up to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or as we could call it, The Lion, the Witch, No Wardrobe, maintains the medium-high standard of its forerunner, higher, that is, than the standards of such close-by epic cycles as the Lord of the Rings series and the Harry …
Post-apocalyptic children’s film, sufficiently dark for any full-bloom pessimist, about the remnants of humanity in a run-down underground city, and the two teenagers in search of an exit. Impressive physical production (Terry Gilliam at his greediest could not have asked for more), though the escape route gets a bit theme-parky. …
Free adaptation of François Bégaudeau’s nonfiction chronicle of a single year of teaching French, or trying to teach it, to a group of restive fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds at a melting-pot public school in a rough district of Paris. Bégaudeau essentially — and needless to say, convincingly — plays himself on …
Vindication for the grainy, jiggly image of the handheld camcorder, the mockumentarist’s best friend and a corner-cutting, cost-cutting device for any purpose. The premise — the excuse — is the making of a video souvenir at the going-away party for a Manhattan yuppie, the night before his departure to a …
A very bad Bad Day at Black Rock, with a Desert Storm hero missing a leg instead of an arm, and a super-patriotic, super-stereotyped bad guy at the head of a war-profiteering corporation modelled on Halliburton, thinly disguised under the name of Hallicorp. With Val Kilmer, Jennifer Esposito, and Gary …
Reunion tour of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (average age, sixty-two and a half), hoping to conjure the spirit of their Vietnam protests and transfer it to the Iraq War. The new music isn’t top-flight, nor is the filmmaking (concert footage, archive footage, interview footage, plus “objective” reporting from an …
The central conceit, and little else, has been retained from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name: a protagonist who ages in reverse. (The story of course was written and titled before the soundalike name of Benjamin Britten came to fame, and as long as they were …
Fashionably “dark” comic-book movie, the first one to think of putting the darkness right up in the title — a synonym, that, for “the bat man,” as he is frequently and unfamiliarly referred to, or simply Batman to you and me. Aside from the title, the second installment in Christopher …
Silvio Soldini’s mature marital drama of middle-class, middle-age economic crisis: lost job, lost house, lost prospects, lost self-respect; set in Genoa but general in application; a bit dull in image but intense in empathy and emotion. Antonio Albanese and Margherita Buy, models of restraint, hide their individual suffering behind the …
The 1951 s-f classic refashioned into a tolerable time-passer on a fast track to oblivion. The urgent mobilization of an ad hoc team of scientists and the descent of a UFO on Central Park get the movie off to a gripping start, once past the prolonged opening credits and 1928 …
Shaky suspense film premised on a mousy accountant tumbling into an exclusive Manhattan sex club, anonymous one-nighters with uniformly beautiful career women: “It’s intimacy without intricacy.” Shakier as it goes. With Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Natasha Henstridge, and Charlotte Rampling; directed by Marcel Langenegger.
Workmanlike account of the untold (or anyhow unfilmed) true story of a 20th-century Moses and his two brothers, who sheltered hundreds of Jews from the Nazis in the forests of Belorussia, such dark days that color itself evidently went into hiding, leaving behind only a greeny or occasionally orangey residue. …
A little girl’s first Sex Education class raises questions in her mind about where she came from, and raises the word “penis” repeatedly to her lips. The answers take the form of a “mystery love story” in which her father recounts in flashback his entanglement with the three leading ladies …
Japan’s Oscar-winner for foreign film is without apology in the sentimental mode, a classification now out of fashion if never (secretly) out of favor. Directed by the veteran Yojiro Takita, it tells of a laid-off cellist, self-admittedly second-rate, who returns from Tokyo to his hometown and answers an ambiguously worded …
George A. Romero, passing off Ontario as his Pennsylvania habitat, raises more zombies for the purpose of running them further into the ground. The tetralogy hereby becomes a pentalogy. The borrowed Blair Witch gimmick of filmmaking students recording the events on shaky camcorders is more expedient than plausible; and the …