Helen Mirren narrates a documentary about five survivors of the Holocaust who reunite to commemorate what would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday. Lest we forget.
Russell Brand plays the loveable drunk made profitably famous by Dudley Moore. Helen Mirren is his nanny, with a snarky crust that falls short of John Gielgud’s Hobson in the 1981 film. Brand lifts his voice to boyish, even girlish heights as the boozing playboy who seeks to avoid union …
Rowan Joffe wrote and directed this adaptation of the Graham Greene novel about warring mobster gangs in England, circa 1964. The crime element is merely backdrop to the film’s real interest, a dysfunctional love story between a psychotic young mob boss and a sheltered waitress, desperate to be his moll. …
The situation in Northern Ireland is pointed up none too undramatically: a Catholic youth, reluctantly drawn into terrorist activities, develops a yen for the Catholic widow of a Protestant policeman he himself had a hand in murdering. The very tentatively unfolding romance is your basic regimen of lending a hand …
Disneyfied recounting of the human-interest story (ca. 1999) about the matronly members of a Yorkshire Women's Institute who posed for a charity cheesecake calendar. An abundance of tittery comedy, but some darker tones, too, and nice plump roles for the capable Helen Mirren, Julie Walters, and others. Directed by Nigel …
The most cryptic credits on any movie ever. The dismissed director, Tinto Brass, is credited only with Principal Photography (not to be confused with Director of Photography), while the final Editing is attributed to an impersonal Kafkaesque entity identified as "the production." The script is proclaimed to be Adapted from …
Constrained kidnap thriller told in parallel action but out-of-step chronology, crosscutting between the teased-out details of an Ohio businessman's abduction ("The man Hertz and Avis are afraid of"), over the course of the first day, and the impact on his family over the numberless days that follow. The why of …
The passage of two years after his 6-year-old daughter’s death finds grieving advertising exec Will Smith addressing letters to Love, Time, and Death. Reasoning that two years is adequate time to suffer, his callous co-workers and purported BFFs (Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, and Michael Pena) employ a private investigator to …
Boringly cryptic and oblique Death-in-Venice tale about an unmarried English couple preyed upon by an ambiguous white-suited native (actually Christopher Walken with a bad accent, explained or excused by biographical brushwork to do with an upbringing in England and a Canadian wife). Harold Pinter, working at about half-alert on an …
Most of it takes place in an out-of-the-way London restaurant nestled at the end of a wind-whipped and smoke-strewn cul-de-sac patrolled by a pack of scavenging dogs: an image of desolation that suggests the most recent visitor thereabouts might well have been the Luftwaffe. The actual best customer and part …
Sidney Lumet, as witness his Network, could never see much point in being humorous unless he could be lecturing you and hectoring you in the bargain. (Not too surprisingly, his climax here gives up all pretense of humor and settles down to strict lecture.) The topic this time out is …
A 2007 Israeli film inspired this fretful thriller about Israeli agents sent to Cold War East Berlin to abduct a notorious Nazi (acted with evil charisma by Jesper Christensen). Two acting teams play the flawed heroes (Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas, Jessica Chastain when young; Tom Wilkinson, Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds …
In my youth, a film such as this was vanquished to the “old people’s movie” bin. Now that I snugly fit the demographic, I take even greater offense to such simple-minded geezer-porn. Jim Broadbent stars as Kempton Bunton, a real life taxi driver/frustrated playwright outraged over a television tax imposed …
A sober but not-quite-somber drone drama that ably portrays the complicated moral calculus involved in modern warfare. (General Sherman said that war is cruelty and there is no use trying to reform it, but there persists the sense that we have to try anyway, especially when we’re firing missiles into …