Notwithstanding the incidental Tchaikovsky, a predominantly British-accented rendition of the Tolstoy story, with an incongruously French-accented title character. Well-dressed but starchy and leaden. Streamlined to the point of effacement. With Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean, Alfred Molina, Mia Kirshner, James Fox, Fiona Shaw; written and directed by Bernard Rose.
Computer-animated comic-book transcription of the unloved epic poem of the 8th Century. Director Robert Zemeckis goes even further with the motion-capture technique of The Polar Express, staking out the borderland between live action and cartoon, and throwing in 3-D to boot. Ray Winstone, voicing the dragon-slaying hero, has been prettified …
Screenwriter and first-time director Caroline Thompson's repayment of debt to one of her girlhood favorites, the Victorian perennial by Anna Sewell. It proceeds at a metronomic clip-clop pace, and there's very little narrative development: what little there is comes literally straight from the horse's mouth. ("It was cold and bright …
Absurd kidnap scheme, to adopt the adjective of the psychiatrist-hero (Michael Douglas) to describe his one-day task (or else...) of unlocking the subconscious of a ten-year mental patient (Brittany Murphy) and retrieving a six-digit figure of unknown relevance. No less absurd is the idea that the kidnappers themselves would know …
The Irish psyche unfurled in a squabble over a patch of green, which an "outsider" from America wants to cover in concrete. For all its smallness, a movie of tall corn -- of mechanical dramaturgy (see the auction scene, where the American hides under an umbrella until "Fifty pounds once, …
Ridiculous heist-and-hostage thriller that requires the retirement-age Harrison Ford to shoulder altogether too much of the burden of heroics -- all of it, to be exact -- as much as Jean-Claude Van Damme shouldered at half the age. And this in the role of a family-man Seattle banker! Not an …
Airborne thriller gets off the ground in good shape, and while aloft adds another variation to the infinitude of locked-room mysteries. After taking her six-year-old daughter to stretch out in the empty back rows of a double-decker jumbo jet, the mother nods off and wakes up, midflight, to find her …
Extensive re-write of the 1986 road-movie thriller of the same name, altering but not eliminating the truck-pull pièce de résistance, the tearing of limb from limb. What emerges from the overhaul is a no-fun Spring Break for a collegiate Cute Couple harassed by a homicidal highway menace (supernatural or just …
The beginning takes place in the vicinity of an Orwellian dystopia, where a closely monitored populace ("Sodium Excess Detected," reads out a urinal at a morning pee) must live in regimented drudgery and sterile isolation, under stricter rules against intergender "proximity" than at a Catholic-school dance, and with the desperate …
The empire of Niflheim is determined to steal the sacred Crystal from the kingdom of Lucis in this Japanese computer-animated science fantasy film based on the video game. Director: Takeshi Nozue. Writer: Takashi Hasegawa. Stars: Aaron Paul, Lena Headey, Sean Bean.
The former Fellowship of the Ring prepare for the final battle for Middle Earth, while Frodo (Elijah Wood) & Sam (Sean Astin) approach Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring. Directed by Peter Jackson, starring Sean Astin, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Bernard Hill, Christopher Lee, and Ian McKellen.
Juvenile adventure yarn about a treasure hunt for the legendary booty of the Knights Templar, handed down to their natural successors, the Masons, and squirreled away by the American Founding Fathers, with clues to its whereabouts written in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence. The Jerry …
A sexual-harassment horror story, single-minded if not simple-minded, set in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, Not Quite That Many Hideous Open-Pit Craters, Two Dead Stags Strapped to a Flatbed, and Untold Chauvinist Pigs. (The soundtrack, a tad predictably, makes use of several songs by that …