Stephen Daldry directs Helen Mirren in a play set during the Queen's regular meetings with the Prime Minister.
National disgrace: another overtaxed premise with an eye to a Franchise. ("This doesn't involve another treasure hunt, does it?") The honorable name of Gates has been implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and rather than finding this historically intriguing, the present-day Gateses find it personally insulting. Exoneration will lie …
Stephen Daldry directs Helen Mirren in a play about the regular private audience held between the Queen of England and her Prime Minister.
How do you know it’s a Disney picture even if you’ve missed the magic castle logo? The protagonist’s mother is dead before the opening credits roll and a mouse shall lead them. Make that King Mouse, a creature made whole only when hundreds of Mickeys stand on each other’s shoulders …
How do you know it’s a Disney picture even if you’ve missed the magic castle logo? The protagonist’s mother is dead before the opening credits roll and a mouse shall lead them. Make that King Mouse, a creature made whole only when hundreds of Mickeys stand on each other’s shoulders …
Skullduggery in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, centered around a seedy little secret agent more Kafka than Graham Greene, occupying a remote Aegean island, faithfully filing reports to the Sultan and hearing nothing in return for twenty years, and now caught up in a plot that he (and we) …
Slow and "heavy" Americanization of an egghead detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Like a lot of actors-turned-director, Sean Penn is disposed to dump an emotional load on his actors and watch them stagger around under it awhile. Most of them -- Benicio Del Toro, Patricia Clarkson, Mickey Rourke, Vanessa Redgrave, …
A spot of simulated Royals-watching, ably guided by the seasoned Stephen Frears: a satisfying, if unsurprising and unrevealing and unimaginative re-enactment of what must have gone on behind closed doors in the week after the death of Princess Di, in specific the diplomatic efforts of the newly elected Tony Blair …
A career girl in the glamorous world of high fashion discovers what really matters in life when she inherits three children from her deceased sister, and meets a hunky Lutheran minister. (She's stunned to learn a Lutheran cleric can date.) True-to-form Garry Marshall comedy: starry-eyed (over Kate Hudson), saccharine, smarmy, …
Comic thriller adapted from a graphic novel: fair warning. The flimsy, presumptuous plot sweeps up a former black-ops agent (classified “red,” for retired, extremely dangerous), along with the Pension Services phone operator with whom he has been flirting long-distance, in a high-level earthshaking conspiracy. A paranoid John Malkovich in a …
Amiable, empty-headed, tender-hearted geriaction flick about a retired agent (Bruce Willis) whose lady love (Mary-Louise Parker) and best buddy (John Malkovich) think he needs to get back in the game. (She thinks he's a little bit boring as a civilian; he thinks their lives are in danger. They're both right.) …
Cursory examination of the festering wound in Northern Ireland, treated with a balm of inspirationalism and rationality as an apolitical Catholic schoolteacher (Helen Mirren, who also served as Associate Producer) inches into activism on behalf of her incarcerated son. The recounted history -- the hunger strike of 1981 -- has …
The Americanization of a BBC miniseries qualifies as a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, and from more than one type of headline: the political sex scandal, the privatization of the military, the death throes of newspapers. The topicality inevitably gives rise to some soapboxing, and along with it some playing on the pieties …
Was blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston, enjoying himself) a self-serving, self-righteous Type A who confused the cause of social justice with his own desire to live well? Or was he a brilliant, pro-worker Good American who figured out how to keep the S.S. Good Conscience afloat during the Red …
A well-to-do English widow (Helen Mirren), touring Italy, flouts convention and marries a much-younger local (Giovanni Guidelli, looking like the young John Derek), a dentist's son who turns out to be far more conventional than his bride ("This is Italy! Married women do not go wandering around alone!"). This interesting …