Clint Eastwood, sorely trying the patience of anyone still hoping for a sixth installment of Dirty Harry, is plainly not yet done paying penance for the casual, callous, and prolific violence of his earlier years. And this elegiac war film makes an essential, an unmissable, piece of the entire cycle, …
Animation from the Aardman Studios, not claymation, like their signature Wallace and Gromit series (and not Nick Park directing), but instead compliant, acquiescent computer animation, and a compliantly, acquiescently crasser and cruder sense of humor to go along with it. (Traces of which began to creep into the feature-length Wallace …
Fulsome tribute to the boys, the men, of the Lafayette Escadrille, the corps of American volunteers who flew for France in the First World War. A throwback, to some extent, to the aviation films of, for the prime example, William Wellman, except that Wellman had himself been a pilot in …
Filmmaker Christopher Guest goes back to the target area of his very first film, The Big Picture -- namely the movie biz, more narrowly the Oscar buzz -- and back before he chained himself to the mockumentary format, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind. Any sense of …
Loopy science fiction in orbit around the dream of life and love everlasting. It unfolds in three different time zones, that of the Spanish Inquisition, the present day, and some indeterminate future inside a floating bubble in outer space. These three spheres are tied together by the presence in each …
From a novel and screenplay by Richard Price, directed by Joe Roth, a ripped-from-today's-headlines thriller that amounts to a virtual collage of newspaper clippings: child abduction, domestic violence, police brutality, racial profiling, ghetto rioting, and whatnot. Julianne Moore is once again a bereft mother, but in trying out, for a …
There are, to be exact, three friends with money, and one without, a former teacher toiling now as a free-lance maid, helping herself to the bedside vibrator of one of her employers, and in her spare time harassing an ex-boyfriend with all-hours phone calls and hang-ups. The three with money …
Also described prefatorily as "a tribute to Diane." Clearly, it's at pains to deflect expectations of a straight, literal, pedestrian biography of the celebrated American photographer of front-and-center freaks (or non-freaks who, so forcibly fronted and centered, merely look like freaks). In spite of the freedom of form, the repressed-Fifties-housewife …
Yet another Disney raid on the annals of sport for an Inspirational True Story: the 1966 NCAA basketball final in which the upstart Miners of Texas Western (today, UTEP) sent out five blacks for the opening tip against the "basketball royalty" of the all-white Kentucky Wildcats. This story, within a …
An illegal Mexican landscaper, a one-man wrecking crew in a weekend soccer league in L. A., catches the eye of a vacationing Brit and sails through a course of low hurdles (a defeatist father, asthma, English weather) to secure a spot on the roster of Newcastle United. Insipid inspirationalism from …
Christopher Quinn's documentary on the Lost Boys of Sudan, refugees of the civil war there, a few of whom are followed to the United States where they attempt to make a new home. A vast subject, covered skimmingly yet intimately: the eating of a pat of butter as if it …
Written and directed by Emanuele Crialese, this is a film that really and truly does its subject — the historical immigrant journey — from beginning to end, bottom to top, forwards and backwards, rustic Sicily to Ellis Island. It does it with taste, with telling detail, and with artistic vision, …
A nostalgist's film noir, one more black-and-white postwar thriller, over a half-century tardy in its arrival, for the buff who has run through Crossfire, Cornered, Notorious, The Stranger, Berlin Express, and Captain Carey, U.S.A., among numerous others, and who still has a hunger. Reassuring archaisms, such as the 4:3 aspect …
Espionage epic, reasonably described by one blurbist as "The Godfather of CIA movies," but only if you are satisfied to retain all the pretentiousness of The Godfather, right down to the oppressive underillumination, and do without any of the enlivening pyrotechnics. (Despite those subtractions, the movie still comes to within …