Half a century of unrequited love, too much time for Javier Bardem to span persuasively, ceding the early years to a younger unmatching actor (Unax Ugalde), then acting awkwardly younger than he looks, then donning a series of stick-on mustaches from coal black to salt-and-pepper to sooty gray. To make …
Under the rare "NC-17" rating, filmmaker Ang Lee shows his high-mindedness by keeping us waiting an hour and a half for the hot stuff (borderline hardcore action, laced with S&M;, the doll-faced newcomer Tang Wei as an unprotesting sex toy), and another hour and ten minutes still to go. What …
Noah Baumbach's somewhat disappointing follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, though maybe not so disappointing if proper heed had been taken of his slovenly visual style, the inexact camerawork, the mismatched shots, the gray, murky, dingy color. But still somewhat disappointing, in the central characterizations, for the sacrifice of …
Sci-fi writer (and widower) adopts a problem child who believes he's from another planet. The means of expression are hackneyed and mawkish, and John Cusack's emotional reserves run only puddle-deep, but the warm, clean, well-lit photography of Robert Yeoman (on whose talents Wes Anderson holds no monopoly) will give the …
Dizzying Disney computer cartoon in 3-D. The startling spatial effects, technically unimpeachable, really do add another dimension. But maybe another dimension is not what's wanted when you are already juggling a mind-tangling time machine, a domestic nuthouse descended from You Can't Take It with You, a Victorian villain of Neanderthal …
Hollywood directorial debut of the Hong Kong twin brothers, Danny and Oxide Pang. Routine haunted-house hijinks, unrelenting and undiscriminating, at a "run-down" farmhouse (to say the least) in North Dakota, with a flock of crows flown in from Bodega Bay out of Hitchcock's The Birds. Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope …
The title figure is the designated fixer for the elite Manhattan law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, touted as a “miracle worker” but more modest in his self-assessment: “I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean it …
The third Frank Darabont film to have been adapted from the works of Stephen King, although the first two, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, were not the sort of work for which that author is best known. (Darabont's intervening film, The Majestic, was truly horrible, horrific, horrid, but …
Genghis Khan, the formative years. Whatever he later might have been guilty of, here are the extenuating circumstances: the poisoning of his father, the abduction of his wife, his sale into slavery, etc., not to forget the burdensome birthright of all Mongols. It makes for a tedious case, sometimes enlivened …
Ostensibly this completes Dario Argento’s witchy trilogy initiated with Suspiria and Inferno, or in other words the trilogy suspended more than a quarter-century earlier. The central storyline, which can stand or fall on its own, concerns the unearthing of an antique urn in a church graveyard, the unleashing thereby of …
The very name invites comparison with that other nonverbal clown, Jacques Tati, and in specific with his Mr. Hulot's Holiday. Rowan Atkinson is a more grossly demonstrative performer, and his humor more demonstrably gross, and of course he is not also a keen-eyed director. That chair is here occupied by …
The once proud Dustin Hoffman, with a prissy lisp, bushy eyebrows, shrubby hair, and ice-cream suits, as the centuries-old proprietor of a magic toyshop: crushed under a riot of color and a steamroller of whimsy. With Natalie Portman, Jason Bateman, and Zach Mills; written and directed by Zach Helm.
Enough laughs in the first few minutes to sustain two or three average screen comedies: a music-video parody of the signature tune of a British bubblegum group of the Eighties -- "Pop Goes My Heart" by Pop!, from beginning to end -- with Hugh Grant shimmying, shaking, and pogosticking in …
Richard Pimentel begins his life as a fighter, and his life's work becomes a process of fighting for the rights of others. Raised by a dysfunctional family with a talent for public speaking and a winning personality, the young man makes his way to a Northwestern college confident that he …
Fence-sitting documentary by Amir Bar-Lev, investigating the art-world mystery of whether or not four-year-old Marla Olmstead was the sole creator of the abstract paintings that have sold for tens of thousands of dollars. The fuzzily blown-up, sometimes horizontally striated image ought to debar the film from any position of authority …