A reversion to the 1950s invasion genre, modernized somewhat with a plug for sunflower seeds and a caution against pesticides, and beefed up needlessly with an "all-star" cast. The invasion, this time around, is by a dark cloud of African bees whose sting is described as "even more virulent than …
Alan Alda stands as a tower of integrity next to the cesspool of Hollywood, a history professor and Pulitzer Prize winner whose nonfiction tome on the American Revolution has been defiled by the schlock-mongers. Or anyway, was about to be defiled. He prevents them by rewriting the script as they …
Steve Coogan and chum Rob Brydon, sort of playing themselves, drive around North England, sample gourmet restaurants, comically recite poetry, needle one another, and offer competing impressions (Coogan’s Michael Caine is slightly better, but Brydon is ace with Anthony Hopkins). Coogan is rather draggy, fretting about his career and serially …
Once more with (a bit less) feeling. English comics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon head off on a third Tour de Food, this time to Spain. The dishes and vistas are as sumptuous as ever, even if the food and wine could stand a little more time in the spotlight. …
An ungifted Chicago TV personality ("My job's very easy, two hours a day, basically reading prompts"), accustomed to getting pelted on the street with fast-food items thrown by passing motorists, shoulders a number of private-life burdens: a Pulitzer Prize-winning father dying of lymphoma before the fortyish son has a chance …
At the outset, yet another KGB agent has just been shaken out of the ranks of British Intelligence, and paranoia is running high. Or is it really paranoia at all? This is unmistakably John le Carré country or its next-door neighbor (the director, Simon Langton, had done the television miniseries …
Sherlock Holmes remodelled, but not improved. Dr. Watson is now an actual man, and an author and deductive genius to boot. Holmes is his invention, impersonated in real life by a ham actor, and "a gambler, a womanizer, and a drunkard." (This pretty well cuts Conan Doyle out of the …
Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) has made something of a crowd pleaser, a gorgeous consideration of the artistic impulse that yields up its fruits without too much of a struggle. (A little patience may be required while the weaver spins out his threads, but they all wind up woven, …