Third big quest for Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes), in a sea of special effects. The 3-D wears down as a wow rather quickly. This is storybook stuff, rich in the boyish bravado of old Errol Flynn movies, soaked in the medieval Christian nostalgia of author C.S. Lewis …
Amiable domestic comedy about a nuclear blue-collar family in which everyone’s got a secret, and one’s got several. Writer and director Raymond De Felitta orchestrates some lively passages of household discord, and he has set the action in a flavorful locale, a New England-y “fishing village” in the middle of …
Jamesian literary tale without the concentration, the ardor, the resonance: an Arab-American academic attempts to secure the co-operation of the family for a biography of a suicided one-book author in Uruguay. A James Ivory film post-Ismail Merchant (d.2005), but still with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to do the screenplay and Anthony …
Any remake would have been hard put to be worse than the laughable original of 1981, and the latest CGI technology, with or without the augmentative 3-D (added as an afterthought in the laboratory), oughtn’t to have had too impossible a job of improving upon the herky-jerky stop-motion monsters of …
Serviceable, not overly salacious, perhaps not sufficiently salacious, summary of the sex scandal that brought down the Governor of New York and former State Attorney General, alias “The Sheriff of Wall Street.” (Spitzer himself dutifully takes a spot in the rotation of talking heads: “This goes back to the days …
Chanel and Stravinsky. (The names arranged on screen in such a configuration as to give the impression the title might be Chanel Coco and Igor Stravinsky.) The Parisian fashionista, that is to say, who offered a haven to the expatriate Russian family-man composer, and eventually offered herself to him as …
Los Colores de la Montaña is a Colombian drama set in a remote region. How far will two boys go to recover their prized soccer ball when it's kicked into a minefield? In Spanish with English subtitles.
Double meaning: the sister of a convicted murderer has complete conviction in his innocence. He may be a ne’er-do-well, but he ne’er did as bad as that. The true case, a DNA exoneration case, serves as an advertisement for the Innocence Project, with a specific plug for Barry Scheck, glamorized …
By-the-book buddy comedy about black and white NYPD partners whose apparently unrelated cases involving Mexican drug runners and a stolen baseball card conveniently dovetail. The sneering and snarling bad guys are played murderously straight, but they’re still funnier than the smirky white (Bruce Willis, on automatic pilot) and buffoonish black …
Far-ranging reassessment of the nuclear threat in the age of terrorism, an effective means of sleep prevention. The concluding call to arms, or rather call to no arms, produces much agreement yet little reassurance. Directed by Lucy Walker.
Gwyneth Paltrow goes country, playing a falling star with a failing marriage (to real-life country star Tim McGraw) and a dead baby on her conscience. There’s some genuine drama to be mined here, but the film is ultimately more interested in soulful youngster Garret Hedlund and his wham-bam-no-thank-you-ma’am relationship with …
Breck Eisner’s remake of a lesser-known George Romero horror show from 1973, a therefore more defensible remake than those of the Dead series, for which we can hope that Romero (credited as executive producer) received decent compensation. The no-nonsense line of action to do with a contagion of homicidal lunacy …
A documentary look inside the world of cancer treatment, one that seeks to offer "a compelling critique of the influence of medical monopolies, the power of pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies."
“Edgy” indie comedy by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass (“mumblecore” movers and shakers, makers of Baghead among others), the premise of which would be just as easy to imagine as a mainstream Will Ferrell vehicle: an oafish divorced lonelyheart (“I’m like Shrek”) thinks he may have found a new …