Nicolas Roeg's psychic thriller, taken from a death-in-Venice story by Daphne Du Maurier, is largely feints and loose ends. What with the free-swingingness of the camerawork and the jaggedness of the cutting (the celebrated Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland lovemaking bout comes out looking like Illustrations A through J in a Danish …
Marlon Brando's fifteen-minute portrait of a Human Rights lawyer at work on a hopeless murder case in South Africa is a welcome dose of caginess in an otherwise artlessly direct protest film, with its burning gaze hardly wavering an inch from The Problem. (The lawyer's fondness for flowers in spite …
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 …
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 …
Adapted from Friedrich Durrenmatt's philosophical detective novel, The Judge and His Hangman. The structural beauty of Durrenmatt's mousetrap holds its shape not nearly as well on the screen as on the page, and the tone has been drastically altered by the overstressed symbolism, the Fellini-esque oom-pah-pah musical score, some stray …
Down-to-earth flatfoot (Denzel Washington, always good to look at, to watch closely, to study) on the trail of an otherworldly serial killer, a fallen angel called Azazel, who has the ability, while manifesting no form of his own, to move from body to body at the merest touch. This makes …
Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson fight to out-cute one another, and out-bronze one another, as a still-in-love divorced couple on a Caribbean treasure hunt, in competition with a murderous rapper. Some of the brutality is truly brutal; none of the humor is humorous. With Donald Sutherland, Ray Winstone, Alexis Dziena, …
A funny thing happened on the way to the cemetery. Vic (Chris Galust) is as compassionate a caregiver as you’re likely to find — off hours finds him looking after his mentally eroding grandfather. But this medical transport driver’s heart of gold is frequently dented by his demanding clientele, in …
It's a sort of poetic injustice that this foppish, effete, fourth-generation specimen of the "caper picture" should crib its title from Edwin S. Porter's hardy pioneer, dated 1903. With Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, Lesley-Anne Down; written and directed by Michael Crichton.
St. Basil's Catholic Parochial School for Boys, Brooklyn, 1965. The photography is so aggressively unattractive, with that fluorescent abrasiveness in which Miroslav Ondricek specializes, that you might almost think the movie took itself seriously. Perish the thought. Every character is one insistent note, strident if not downright sour: fat bespectacled …
In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …
In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …
Katniss Everdeen won her murder tournament in The Hunger Games. Now she has to deal with the aftermath. Once again, the best reason for seeing a Hunger Games movie is star Jennifer Lawrence, whose protean, Old Hollywood visage brings to mind the line about how They Had Faces Then. And …
After the forced histrionics of Part 1, it’s nice to see star Jennifer Lawrence being allowed to quiet down and act again. But the story still feels stretched, a countdown that slows as it approaches zero hour. The various Districts, long divided and conquered by the Capitol, have united behind …
University of Miami psychologist looks into the case of a fellow faculty member, a primatologist who dropped out to live among the gorillas in Africa, becoming a sort of grown-up Mowgli, and who now is returned to the U.S. in chains, lugging a murder rap and important lessons for civilized …