Jackie Chan and Robert Redford narrate this family documentary that examines the power and beauty of the natural world.
A former rodeo champion (Robert Redford) endures endless degradation as a commercial ambassador for a breakfast cereal, protecting himself from the blows to his pride by keeping himself pickled to the gills. When he sees that his corporate bosses have in mind the same sort of tawdry show-biz career for …
An all-star history of the environmental movement. Narration by Robert Redford and Meryl Streep! The Sierra Club! Love Canal! Earth Day! Greenpeace! Amazon Deforestation! Global Warming! Don't ask for a coherent point, except maybe that different people have cared about the environment in different ways and for different reasons at …
A money's-worth movie of broad scope, big cars, buttery talk, proud postures, and dubious purpose. The assumption appears to be that everyone will have missed Richard Lester's Cuba (1979) or else that anyone who did catch it didn't like it well enough to remember it. As embarrassingly similar as these …
Robert Redford's almost three-hour rendering of the Nicholas Evans best-seller, a gussied-up grade-A version of the staple triumph-over-adversity made-for-TV movie, with Nature Company greeting-card photography and a high-class cast (Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Dianne Wiest, Chris Cooper, in addition to Redford). The adversity arrives in a hurry: a more …
Michael Apted's documentary companion piece to his fictional Thunderheart: no permissive mysticism this time, and no tidy Hollywood ending either (though one can clearly see the leanings that would lurch all the way to the FBI-as-bad-guy conclusion of the fiction film). This is strictly true-crime stuff, re-examining the murders of …
The edifying and entertaining spectacle (not in the ways intended) of Hollywood high rollers wrestling with a Moral Question. Here's the question: What if a perfect stranger were to offer a happily married couple a million dollars for one night with the wife? Or to put it another way: Does …
The saga of a mountain man, salted with uncomfortable, self-conscious "legendary" qualities — ballads, hammily colloquial narration, quaint dialogue. With the actors (especially golden-haired Robert Redford) trying to be lovable, and with Pollack's direction trying for aloof, expensive pictorializing, any sense of frontier hardship is blockaded from the screen.
Robert Redford returns to Brubaker mode as a prison reformer, only this time it's a military prison and he himself is a prisoner, a much-decorated general, former Vietnam POW, author of the biblical Burden of Command, and a man of such loyalty and integrity that he opted not to fight …
Romantic comedy-thriller of the type populated (and lorded over) by Nick and Nora Charles. And a perfectly acceptable example of the type for anyone who remembers the Thin Man series as something less than sacrosanct classics (who remembers them, in other words, clearly). The one who makes the difference here …
Another Robert Redford literary adaptation (what else?), complete with a voice-over narration almost as nagging as that of A River Runs through It. The narrator is an uncredited Jack Lemmon, suffering a prefatory heart attack on the golf course, lying flat on his back in the rough off the fairway, …
Topics on the table: the war on terror, the lack of a battle plan to wage it, the governmental policy of disinformation, the complicity of the press in all this, the general lowering of journalistic standards, the apathy of the younger generation, the ivory-towerism of academe, and (if that's not …
Two mentally gifted pre-teens from opposite sides of the social scale, and of the Atlantic Ocean, recognize one another as kindred spirits through their mutual interest in the philosophy of Heidegger (whom the slightly more worldly boy has, however, outgrown). There is little else in this ingratiating romantic comedy to …
A specimen of Capra-esque populism in minority clothing, to do with a Little Man who won't step aside for the big-shot developers. The impish white-haired angel, for example, is pure Capra-corn (to borrow a coinage from Manny Farber); only the sombrero and serape are impure. Even at that, the regional …
Pedophilia (at the hands of a Little League coach who looks like Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid), male prostitution, unprotected sex and the inevitable V.D., in the "dumb-ass hick town" of Hutchinson, Kansas. Pretty rough in content, and pretty crude in style. The employment of phantom space aliens as …