At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting …
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 …
Sam Raimi clamps down his comic-book graphic style — Wellesian deep focus, tilted cameras, magnifying-glass closeups — on the Western genre. For him, a new frontier. Essentially he has worked out an exhaustive series of variations on the Main Street showdown: the two opponents lined up on a parallel visual …
Early on in director and co-writer Alejandro González Iñárritu’s small-scale epic, frontiersman Hugh Glass (played with almost frightening commitment by Leonardo DiCaprio) learns the hard way that if you get too near a mother bear’s cubs, she will have at you. And even if — through some astonishing combination of …
Director Sam Mendes returns to the suburban stamping ground of his filmmaking debut, American Beauty, but at the very opening of that territory in the 1950s, at the inception, that is to say, of all the clichés of cookie-cutter conformity, Little Boxes, the Lonely Crowd, lives of quiet desperation, and …
Postmodern nightmare of Hawaiian sports shirts, pyrotechnical displays, hallucinogenic drugs, exotic fish (our star-crossed lovers first lay eyes on each other from opposites sides of the aquarium), underwater kisses, wedding music by Prince, the Crypt of a Thousand Candles, and a bag-of-tricks cinematic technique. Shake-and-bake-speare, let's call it. The setting …
“Disturbing” would be one word, maybe the best word, for Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Fifties-period Dennis Lehane detective novel. Nothing, let’s be clear, in the list of ingredients — the Alcatrazzy asylum for the criminally insane, the locked-room mystery of a vanished female inmate, the dreamland visitations from the …
Based on Tobias Wolff's memoir of his middle-to-late teen years, from the late Fifties to Sixty, during which period his footloose single mother settled down and remarried an auto mechanic in the ominously named small town of Concrete, Wa. (Wedding-night revelation: "You can get it doggy style or laying on …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …
Total mistake. Conventional literary "biopic" on the anti-conventional French poets (and homosexual lovers) Rimbaud and Verlaine, the both of them reduced to boorish bohemians who never have to put up any actual work in partial justification. The cast produces an international cacophony: the American Leonardo DiCaprio as the adolescent Rimbaud …
The sort of title that seems highly unlikely to precede a good movie. What follows in this instance does not lower the odds. As a slice of family life in small-town America, the movie is so hell-bent on being "different" as to be unrecognizable as small-town America or as family …
Recommendable to anyone desirous of an old-fashioned bubblegum comedy, bright and sweet and airy and chewy, about a Piggly Wiggly checker in Frazier's Bottom, W.Va., who gets selected out of the legion of Internet applicants for a night on the town with a Hollywood heartthrob anxious to reclaim his image …
Martin Scorsese’s latest, most outrageous essay on common denominators living the life of upscale, drug-enhanced, and power-infested businessmen to the manner born. Set to the tune of metronome camera moves, protagonist and unrepentant jerk Jordan Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) first day on the job in a strip-mall penny-stock shithole finds him …