We open with four-legged friend Enzo (voiced by Kevin “3-Packs-A-Day” Costner), explaining why a dog’s tongue makes it impossible for the animal to speak. And just like that, I’m psyched at the promise of a good dog movie. We know from the outset that before it ends, Enzo will make …
A renaming and reworking by Atom Egoyan of the French film Nathalie by Anne Fontaine. Despite the pedigree (Egoyan, if you need reminding, has signed such tony items as Ararat, The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, among others), this would fit comfortably on the Lifetime Movie Network: a suspicious wife sics a …
Wartime romance beginning in the spring of 2001 (you know what’s coming) and stretching up to the present, staggeringly basic and banal in its specifics, turning on a senseless withholding of information for the sole purpose of contrived misunderstanding and revealed nobility. It issues from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, …
If time were currency, would you hoard it for eternal life or make every day a risky spree of mortality? In the near-future of an L.A. shot with elegant noir streamlining by Roger Deakins and directed by Kiwi-Brit stylist Andrew Niccol (Gattaca), people live to 25, stop aging, and then …
What is it about this grab-bag of contrivances, this last word in geezer porn, that attracted the likes of Shirley MacLaine? To set the plot in motion, the newspaper that leisure-class dowager Harriett Lauler (MacLaine) uses to blot up the wine spilled during her botched suicide attempt is conveniently open …
Sincere story of answered prayers, mostly those of one Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), an ex-con who tastes mercy and tries to break free from his criminal past (he stole a loaf of bread). But the reformed man is pursued by Javert (Russell Crowe), a lawman who does not believe reform …
The poise and grace of Vanessa Redgrave, her reunion on screen with Franco Nero (her Lancelot in Camelot, the father of one of her children), and a mouthwatering tour of Tuscany are insufficient counterweights to the slop bucket of false sentiments about romantic love. With Amanda Seyfried, Christopher Egan, and …
No you won’t. From Jessie Nelson, the man who brought us Stepmom, I Am Sam, and Fred Claus...need I go on? Staler than year-old rum cake and louder than June Squbb’s holiday sweater, Hollywood yet again ushers in the Christmas season with a dysfunctional family racing to get it together …
The Catherine Johnson stage musical brought to the screen under its stage director, Phyllida Lloyd: a romantic-comic bauble about a scheduled wedding on a Greek island, to which the bride-to-be, unknown to her mother, has invited the three men who are sole candidates to be her biological father. (All three …
They cast wasn’t kidding when they sang S.O.S., because if ever there was a case of same old shit, it’s this. Like being forcibly breastfed impalpable cheer for two hours, Mamma Mia! was a colorful travelogue bestrewn with sweeping shots of movie stars vacationing on Universal’s dime and doing calisthenics …
They cast wasn’t kidding when they sang S.O.S., because if ever there was a case of same old shit, it’s this. Like being forcibly breastfed impalpable cheer for two hours, Mamma Mia! was a colorful travelogue bestrewn with sweeping shots of movie stars vacationing on Universal’s dime and doing calisthenics …
Nine differing women, divided into nine single takes, each around twelve minutes in length, with some crossover of characters from one segment to another. The form itself makes a statement, something about their lives being separate, but equal, but connected. The acting is mostly strong; the writing is sometimes stagy; …
Like a Pieter Bruegel picture reduced to a “cool” medieval fair in rural Wisconsin. Peasants, haunted by sex and Satan, do a weird sort of ancestral disco dance à la Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Amanda Seyfried, looking made of cheese from the moon, casts the lunar spell of her …