Donald Sutherland sags into his Roman toga when his soldier nephew (Channing Tatum) goes almost solo from Britannia into dark, primeval, 2nd-century Scotland to retrieve (great Caesar’s ghost!) the gold eagle of his dead father’s decimated legion. Though a limited actor, Tatum has the brawny force of meat on a …
Political paranoia thriller so utterly preposterous that it has the opposite effect and reassures us we have nothing to worry about. (And so pell-mell in presentation that we can barely follow it.) Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, as ordinary citizens under the eye, thumb, and puppet-strings of Big Brother, are …
A Raoul Walsh-ian war film turned topsy-turvy so that the Nazis take over the Errol Flynn-Ronald Reagan roles. The story has to do with a typically humble Nazi scheme to kidnap Winston Churchill, and the hopelessness of the task adds some firm evidence of action director John Sturges's preoccupation with …
Documentarian Otto Bell’s titular huntress — a 13-year-old Kazakh named Aisholpan who hails from a family boasting generations of champion (male) eagle hunters — is impossible not to like and/or root for. She’s cheerful, natural, diligent, sweet, and full of dreams about following in her father’s footsteps. So Dad consults …
Action drama written and directed by Karthik Gattamneni, starring Ravi Teja, Kavya Thapar, Anupama Parameswaran, Navdeep, and Srinivas Avasarala.
Clearly and weirdly blind to the limitless potential afforded by an animated feature set during the dawn of man, the usually imaginative Nick Park (Chicken Run, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) squanders 90 minutes sketching a wearisome soccer match between the Stone Age and the Bronze World. Add to this …
The second of a "Trilogy of the Elements" by Indian-born, Canadian-based filmmaker Deepa Mehta. It has little in common with Fire, the first, beyond its Indian setting, its general interest in social changes there, and its alluring leading lady, Nandita Das. The backdrop this time is historical, at the very …
The circle of life, all around the globe, arctic to tropic, desert to ocean, illustrated everywhere in luscious calendar art, crystalline in digital projection. The Disney nature documentary allows some survival-of-the-fittest brutality, but none of the gore that would accompany it. “Yes,” concludes narrator James Earl Jones, “it’s full of …
One in a rash of fires lit on screen for the environmental movement. Documentarist Robert Stone, stepping back for the long view, gathers his fuel from the origins of the movement, the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the mobilization that led up to the first Earth Day …
A musical spoof about aliens in the San Fernando Valley, which looks very much like a musical spoof by aliens in the San Fernando Valley. In a sense, it very much is. The documentable alien in command is British director Julien Temple, whose well-known music-video credentials will perhaps make the …
An intimate coming of age story of a pregnant single mother who embraces her Bay Area community as she determines the fate of her family. From writer/director Savanah Leaf and starring Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander, Keta Price, Doechii, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Bokeem Woodbine, and Dominic Fike
Jackie Chan and Robert Redford narrate this family documentary that examines the power and beauty of the natural world.
Totally not a remake of Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. For one thing, there's no absent father. For another, the titular alien is a cute robot instead of a lumpen critter. For still another, he doesn't need to phone home. Rather, he needs to assemble the key to his ride, …
Sarah (star and cowriter Brit Marling) is a rising star at a private espionage agency who gets assigned to infiltrate the titular domestic protest organization. The East does punishment-fits-the-crime work: flooding the home of an oil exec with the same crude that his company spilled all over a coastline, etc. …