Shoot-from-the-hip political satire about a cooked-up conflict with innocuous Albania in order to deflect attention, two weeks ahead of the election, from a Presidential sex scandal. We briefly hear, never clearly see, the President himself; the principal players are his damage-control trouble-shooter (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin …
The story is based on Robert Kimmel Smith’s bestselling children’s novel; the family it presents is strictly standard issue. Circumstances force retired architect Ed (Robert De Niro) to move in with his daughter's (Uma Thurman) family. It’s grandson Peter (Oakes Fegley) whose anger kicks off the so-called conflict. In an …
Robert De Niro and Sean Penn go through the entire movie with the facial expressions of having a very bad smell in their nostrils. This must be their notion of comic acting. It can't be that they've got a premonitory whiff of the finished product. For one thing, De Niro …
Hollywood Semi-Confidential: a fictionalization of producer Art Linson’s chatty, catty tell-all. (The bearded, overweight Alec Baldwin, for example, becomes a bearded, overweight Bruce Willis, “as himself.”) The producer protagonist is curiously undercharacterized — though heftily embodied in Robert De Niro — and the fictionalizing renders the whole thing less personal …