The Evelyn Waugh novel revisited, at roughly a fourth the length of the early-Eighties TV miniseries. Matthew Goode, as the self-professed atheist artist Charles Ryder, murmurs his way through the pages of a radical rewrite (particularly the gay abandon): first year at Oxford, the tormented Catholics of Brideshead manor, Venice, …
The Coen brothers revisit their favored stupidity theme: Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski (that one above all), O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the secondhand Ladykillers, at least the Llewellyn Moss protagonist in No Country for Old Men. Back to the well once more. The placement of this …
Directorial debut of the screenwriter of Babel, 21Grams, Amores Perros, Guillermo Arriaga, firm in the belief that no story is so hokey it can't be saved by being fractured, shattered, reassembled out of order. (The connection between two widely separated time zones would have been easier to make if not …
The emergence of rock-and-roll, as seen from the catbird seat of Chess Records in Chicago: Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Etta James, et al. The golden music, the vintage cars, the period hairdos retain their glamour; the backstage clichés are just old. Adrien Brody, as producer Leonard …
The first Jordanian cinematic import, nothing to awaken a craving: an ineptly manipulative heart-tugger about an airport janitor who fishes a captain’s hat from the trash and regales the neighborhood kids with fictitious tales of his world travels. Nadim Sawalha, Rana Sultan; directed by Amin Matalqa.
Clint Eastwood was due for a dud, and this stacks up as his flattest film, his stumpiest film, since Blood Work, bookending his hot streak of Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and the Second World War diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Time once again to …
A poor little rich boy, drummed out of every private school in a reachable radius, shows up undiplomatically for his first day at public school in a blazer and tie, toting an attaché case, glad-handing like a Presidential candidate. But after a beating or two, he attains his uppermost goal …
First half of Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour worship service in honor of Che Guevara, conducted in Spanish with English subtitles, really two distinct movies. This first, in wide screen and in roomy frames, operates a time shuttle between vivid color re-enactments of the overthrow of Batista in the late Fifties and …
The free-standing second half of Steven Soderbergh’s worship service, in narrower screen than the first half, and in less vivid color and no black-and-white, unfolds a contrastingly chronological account of Guevara’s final year, 1966-67, his ill-fated attempt to do in Bolivia what he had done in Cuba. As in the …
Modest, quiet, contemplative, bittersweet tale of the loss of a life partner and the living-on of the departed one (however briefly) in the surviving one. The partners are a cozy old Bavarian couple, a stick-in-the-mud husband chained to routine and resistant to change, and his self-repressed Japanophile wife whose abandoned …
Radical nostalgia for a time when anti-war sentiment was working itself up to “the Second American Revolution.” (A long way from the current sentiment against the war in Iraq.) The Democratic National Convention of 1968 and the subsequent trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, et al., …
True tale of a British correspondent in China during the Japanese invasion of 1937, reluctantly assuming responsibility for five dozen war orphans. The cardboard characters, the battering-ram dramaturgy, and the lackluster look of the thing (excepting the luminous Michelle Yeoh as a shady lady) fail to substantiate the truth of …
Black comedy, a bit too openly pleased with itself, a bit too hell-bent on quirkiness, revolving around a confessed sex addict and his demented mother, played (respectively) by Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston. The broadest smiles, the nearest things to audible laughs, are apt to be elicited by the tourist-trap …
The Angeleno portrait artist Don Bachardy reminisces in frugal video on his three and a half decades of intimacy with British author Christopher Isherwood, thirty years his senior. (The one clip of Isherwood with sound demonstrates dramatically how closely the American protégé patterned his speech after his mentor.) In essence, …
Family reunion and reconciliation: the black sheep returns from banishment in time for his mother’s battle with cancer. The setting-up of who’s who is clumsy, and the occasional direct address to the camera is lazy, and two and a half hours are more than enough. But the unified French ensemble …