A power surge on an International Space Antenna nearly knocks career astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, in his earnest, Robert Redford mode) out of commission. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that Ad Astra, Latin for “to the stars,” is Apocalypse Now in space — there’s a lot of Capt. Willard …
Viewers of a certain age may remember Robert Redford as one of the great handsome men of cinema. The sun-kissed skin, the wind-tousled hair, the little-boy smile that let you know he couldn’t lose. Like the title says, all is lost. Disaster rouses an solo yachtsman from comfortable sleep: a …
The movie version of the Carl Bernstein-Bob Woodward book betokens the promotion of mild-mannered Clark Kent to the hero's role, protector of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. This post-Watergate permutation of the newspaper genre clings to plenty of starry-eyed ideas (Gordon Willis's lighting, for instance, sets up an overstated …
Ambitious yet sloppy, amateurish, home-movie-ish documentary wherein two young women with two video cameras set off cross-country to collect comments from common men and celebrities alike on the present shape of the American Dream. (Commentators include John Waters, Studs Terkel, Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins, Robert Redford, Willie Nelson, Michael Stipe …
A different and diffident sort of movie comedy, which takes up the limited-interest subject of a Boston underground newspaper, why it lost its aim in the post-Nixon Seventies, and how it finishes the good fight not with a bang, but with a whimper. The style is realistic caricature, and it …
The doctored picture that kicks things off — four badly photoshopped heads to represent 40 years of friendship — sets a tone of fierce laziness for an impotent sex comedy about four yentas committing to reading the 50 Shades trilogy. Our lettered leading ladies — Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary …
The re-staging of Operation Market Garden, the Allies' ill-conceived attempt to capture a string of Nazi-occupied Dutch bridges, takes three hours on screen, and the complex logistics of the attack seem sufficient in themselves to hold your interest for that long. But the chief reason for the film's largeness is …
A great documentary portrait. Buck Brannaman, inspiration and advisor for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer, seems able to get inside horses on an intuitive, spiritual level, gentling the animals (except one that is dangerously crazy) as he teaches them and their awed owners. A survivor of paternal brutality, Buck is …
Robert Redford's childlike sulkiness and reluctance do not add credibility to this political fairy tale about a nice quiet boy becoming an overnight big-time bigwig. Along the campaign trail, there are some peripheral amusements, but there is the sense that the filmmakers know more than they are telling us about …
E.B. White's barnyard children's story, a friendship fable about the promise of a spider to save a spring pig from the smokehouse. Sweet sentiment soured by the cacophonous Cultural Diversity of the animal voices (British sheep, Southern cows, African-American geese, New York City rat, Julia Roberts spider, and so on) …
His trademark fast-shuffle editing does wonders to disguise the fact that one-third of this Russ Meyer film was accidentally destroyed in the laboratory. A slight setback, that. To plug up the gaps, Meyer belatedly added a voluptuous mute pixie named Haji, who flits mischievously through the movie and establishes a …
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 …
What does Robert Redford have to do to make you people understand how un-American the War on Terror really is? Does he have to plop you down into post-Civil War America? Will you make him hash out every possible parallel between the trial of Mary Surratt for her role in …