Juvenile game of Good vs. Evil (as Milton Bradley might put it: Ages 6 to 10), set in a Medieval fantasyland populated by mages and commoners, a sulky teenage empress, a giant red-bearded "dwarf," a full-grown pointy-eared "elf," a British-accented mock-Shakespearean bad guy (Jeremy Irons, destroying any last shred of …
A teenage boy, a telepathically talking dragon, a captive princess, an evil king, a sorcerer, an oppressed populace, a rebel band, and a first-time director schooled in CGI (Stefen Fangmeier, who surely ought to have cut his teeth on a vampire film). Altogether, a snigger when not a snore. With …
Ridiculous heist-and-hostage thriller that requires the retirement-age Harrison Ford to shoulder altogether too much of the burden of heroics -- all of it, to be exact -- as much as Jean-Claude Van Damme shouldered at half the age. And this in the role of a family-man Seattle banker! Not an …
John Fowles's Victorian-age romance has been interwoven with a modern-day romance between the two lead actors starring in a screen adaptation of that book -- not between the two real-life actors, Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, but between two fictional actors who are played by the aforementioned two real ones. …
The film begins as its story ends — with the handsome, introspective lead character (Tom Hiddleston) picking through the rubble of a broken building, finding a dog, bringing it back to his ruined apartment, then slaughtering it and roasting its hind leg on a spit while cheerful classical music streams …
Bille August's treatment of the Isabel Allende novel (with most of the "magical realism" weeded out) might almost be a treatment of a Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon novel: a glob of sentimental (i.e., universally accessible) Leftism about love across the class divide, the belated enlightenment of a stick-in-the-mud, hope …
Or, One More Reason Why the Middle East Hates the West. Back, back, back to the 12th Century, back to before the Third Crusade ("To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven"), equipped with cultural relativism, vats of blood, miles of slow-motion, and wave after …
A glossy but visceral “National Geographic entertainment” in which we follow a lioness in Botswana, exiled from her pride and desperately hunting for her three cubs (they don’t all make it). Stunning images in the wild but also a heavy hand of drama pressed along by Jeremy Irons’s grave, pompous …
Predigested heroic myth to do with a lion cub called Simba, rightful heir to the paradisiacal pridelands, dispossessed by a Machiavellian uncle, and — no need to go on. The apotheosis of Joseph Campbell into a household name has not been a boon to the fictional imagination. The prince in …
Predigested heroic myth to do with a lion cub called Simba, rightful heir to the paradisiacal pridelands, dispossessed by a Machiavellian uncle, and — no need to go on. The apotheosis of Joseph Campbell into a household name has not been a boon to the fictional imagination. The prince in …
Adrian Lyne's decade-long labor of love, a faithful remake of the Nabokov novel, true to the period of the novel, true to the narrative of the novel, truer than Kubrick, bends over backwards to win sympathy for the infamous Humbert Humbert (in the pity-please performance of Jeremy Irons), the visiting …
Seventeenth-century French history rewritten as if for TV soap opera: the secret twin brother of the cruel King Louis. (The big throb: the Queen Mother comes face to face with the son she never knew she had, and vice versa.) There is no worthy villain; the action is spotty, and …
When we meet Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel, playing serious), he is scrawling equations on the floor of a Hindu temple. Because for him, “an equation has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” Take that, science vs. religion! But alas, God isn’t in the academic …
Not bad, if you want the 2008 financial collapse reduced to an adrenalized ego showdown in f-wordy debt to David Mamet. Kevin Spacey is the greed pig who squishes best. Jeremy Irons is the predator who heads the investment firm, seeming to welcome disaster with a shark’s appetite. Writer-director J.C. …