Alfonso Cuarón seemingly follows carefully the attractive pattern of Agnieszka Holland's Secret Garden, starting from a lesser known work of the same novelist, Frances Hodgson Burnett. It opens similarly in India in 1914, where the prepubescent heroine has earnestly learned from her father, the oxymoronic Captain Crew(e), the lesson that …
Three generations of close friends from Ballygar, a hard-knocks community in Dublin, have one tantalizing dream: to win a pilgrimage to the sacred French town of Lourdes, that place of miracles that draws millions of visitors each year. Directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan, starring Laura Linney, Maggie Smith, Agnes O'Casey, and …
Rather retrograde British comedy, the intended cheekiness of which is thoroughly stifled by the familiarness and outmodedness of its targets: dotty clerics, dotty gentry, dotty menials, dotty anybodies, in Edwardian England. The familiarness is not entirely without benefits, such as, for example, the supreme ease with which the various comic …
The world's five greatest detectives, modelled in Mad Magazine-style after famous fictional sleuths (Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett are overly in evidence, each contributing two to the quintet), are invited for dinner and murder at a spooky mansion in rural England. A mystery composed of all detectives and no suspects …
Israel Horovitz writes and directs this film version of his play about a man (Kevin Kline, clay-faced but with a voice like butter) dealing with what his recently deceased father has bestowed upon him. Materially, that means an apartment in Paris, fully equipped with the titular old lady (a seemingly …
Elaborated considerably beyond the Joan Littlewood stage production, this vast patchwork of anti-war skits takes special aim at jolly British jingoism, trying out a variety of attacks, from the tartly satirical to the heart-tugging, in order to win its point. It coincides curiously with the release of The Battle of …
Good old-fashioned character drama in bad old-fashioned British studio technique. It's adapted from Jay Presson Allen's play adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel about a Scottish girls'-school teacher, who, in the 1930s, impresses her own peculiar romantic ideals (pro-Franco, for instance) on her loyal students. Pamela Franklin, as the pivotal pupil, …
Malcolm Mowbray directs Maggie Smith, Michael Palin, and a host of English character actors in this story of a desperate attempt to eat well in hard times.
British social comedy, more fearlessly ill-mannered than the old Ealing Studio ones it has widely been likened to, centered around the post-war food shortages and austerity programs. A small-town milquetoast chiropodist ("Mrs. Roach's ingrown toenail seems to have turned the corner"), egged on by his social-climbing wife ("I want a …
Good acting has seldom been more excellent than in this, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut. Dusty lives up to his nickname with a whiskered senior moment of a movie. (It’s best that Hoffman started late in the game; audiences won’t have to put up with too many more vanity projects like …
The Lost Generation in Paris: James Ivory has fashioned a nice companion piece to his Wild Party (the Lost Generation in Hollywood). This, adapted from the autobiographical novel by Jean Rhys, is a good deal more diffuse than the other (the most gratuitous digression, to do with a skinflint pornographer, …
The natural period of adjustment to any play by Shakespeare is here apt to take a little longer: the Elizabethan blank verse has been transplanted, with minor revisions, into an alternate-universe England circa the 1930s. (Marlowe's "Come live with me and be my love ..." is sung to a swinging …
Another illustrated "classic" from the people who gave you The Europeons and The Bostonians: not Henry James this time, but E.M. Forster. The illustrations in this instance are handsome enough, though a little heavy on the starch. They are divided up at intervals by facetious chapter headings, or captions, along …
More tales of love and impending death among English retirees in India. This time around, the story is driven by the young proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel), who is simultaneously preparing to marry his fiancee and expand his hospitality empire. His ambition for the latter tends to overshadow his devotion to …
A good children's movie. To split hairs: a good movie for children and also a movie good for children. Good for them in the sense that it is a good introduction to concepts of the inner world and the outer world, living and dying, growth and stuntedness, courage and surrender …