An uphill battle, gamely fought. Franco Zeffirelli, using a (for him) subdued palette, is certainly a more cinematic director than, for a close-by example, Kenneth Branagh in Henry V. So much so that if the sound were to be switched off, the remaining picture would appear to be a truebred …
The 28-year-old British Wunderkind Kenneth Branagh has dared to attempt to replicate Olivier's feat — his triple feat — of adapting, directing, and starring in a screen treatment of Part III of Shakespeare's "Prince Hal" trilogy, and has additionally dared to give it a completely new slant without doing undue …
Stanley Tucci's third directing effort (his second solo), all starring himself, all period pieces, all dealing with one or another aspect of the Artistic Temperament, only this one based on fact. In it, Tucci plays the Southern-bred New Yorker staff writer Joe Mitchell, who profiles a true-blue bohemian with darker …
A smarty-pants comedy that outsmarts itself. It tells of your basic disgruntled ex-employee who storms the boss's office with a gun (ha-ha) to demand his job back, but who comes away instead with the boss's daughter as a hostage and without actually killing anyone. The bigger joke (ha-ha-ha) is, or …
Dr. Tolkien's home-cooked myth. First course only. All manner of visual invention, photographic trickery, computer magic, etc., cannot alter what is in essence an overblown bedtime story. They can only blow it up bigger. And the burden of it is more or less tripled by the knowledge that these three …
Overly verbal, narration-heavy elucidation of the world of an illicit arms dealer. It's no help that the narrator and arms dealer is a smug cynic who chews our ears off for a full two hours: "By the mid-Eighties, my weapons were represented in eight out of the world's top ten …
David Cronenberg carries on his dubious search to find "straighter," more respectable outlets for his creature-feature schlock tactics: this time, the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, although the movie is not a direct adaptation of it, but rather a reconstruction of the (highly drugged) state of mind …
Sidney Lumet in his accustomed role as message carrier and conscience nag. He is always at his least subtle when, as here, he trusts himself to author his own screenplay (Prince of the City, Q&A;), to say nothing of the supplementary, seven-paragraph Director's Statement in the press notes: "Why am …
Disney computer-animated celebration of "differentness," in specific a Gallic rodent who cultivates fine taste, reads books, likes to cook, walks funny, and runs afoul of his garbage-wallowing kin. (Do ask, do tell!) Among the humans, there's some deft caricature of French facial types, a bit rodenty themselves -- especially the …
Frigid Canadian film about a multiple-fatality school-bus accident and its aftermath: well worked out thematically, not so well dramatically. Though the readings from, and congruencies with, Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin (in a handsome volume illustrated by Kate Greenaway) are heavy-handed and over-obvious, the idea of "loss" is …