Louis De Funes's brand of comedy, a specialized taste if ever there was, seems to be aimed at cribs and high chairs and baby buggies. With him, making funny faces is a nervous reaction to any three consecutive seconds of calm. His various squints and head-tilts perhaps put him in …
Four escapees from the Central Park Zoo -- a lion, a zebra, a hippo, and a giraffe -- are packed up and, in fulfillment of the tenth-birthday wish of the zebra, shipped back to the wild: "the live-in-a-mudhut-wipe-yourself-with-a-leaf wild," in the less sanguine view of the lion. ("They are just …
Or, You Can Go Home Again, But Would You Really Want To? The lion, hippo, giraffe, and zebra who escaped the Central Park Zoo and got back to Africa decide that they miss life in the Big City. They wind up joining a broke-down circus in hopes of landing a …
The light-in-the-loafers cartoon lion, a self-professed “protégé of Fosse and Robbins,” accidentally finds his way, along with the zebra, the hippo, and the giraffe, back to his ancestral home, where he proves to be an embarrassment to his kingly father: “Lions don’t dance.” The not so subtle pleas for diversity …
So it's come to this. Claude Chabrol, one of the original New Wavers, those enemies of "prestige" cinema and of literary cinema, is reduced to doing a tasteful, well-mounted, and sparsely narrated treatment of one of the (truly) Great Books. Well, Jean Renoir, one of the New Wave's spiritual fathers, …
French-Israeli collaboration about a former prostitute and concentration camp prisoner who makes do in her dotage by babysitting for prostitutes' children, including one in particular, an Arab boy called "Momo," who is her special pet. This bit of dowdy humanism takes a chucklesome approach to Jewish-Moslem differences, but it is …
Small-scale character piece about a large-scale character: a great teacher (of piano), a great fanatic, a great eccentric, a great "character" in short, and at times -- thanks to Shirley MacLaine's great appetite for ham -- a great bore. The life around her, when it can crowd in, is lifelike …
Genial counterculture comedy centering around a commune of Long Beachniks and an East German Communist who "infiltrates" the group. For Paul Morrissey, after his Sherlock Holmes venture in England and his Frankenstein/Dracula ventures on the Continent, this represents a throwback to his less polished Warhol Factory work -- in other …
Dakota Johnson plays Cassandra Webb, a paramedic in Manhattan who develops the power to see the future… and realizes she can use that insight to change it. Forced to confront revelations about her past, she forges a relationship with three young women bound for powerful destinies...if they can all survive …
Dakota Johnson plays Cassandra Webb, a paramedic in Manhattan who develops the power to see the future… and realizes she can use that insight to change it. Forced to confront revelations about her past, she forges a relationship with three young women bound for powerful destinies...if they can all survive …
Low-pressure comedy about the human urge to be somewhere or someone else. The contrived and self-conscious eccentricity of the set-up somewhat removes the theme from its rightful universality. Wayne, sarcastically nicknamed "Mad Dog" for his nonviolent tendencies, is a crime-scene photographer who would really rather be an art-gallery photographer. And …
Latest installment of big, bossy Madea’s sitcomical life from director, star, and indie-film mogul Tyler Perry. He has made it clear that TV can be profitably packaged as a movie franchise for predominantly black and church-going fans. With Loretta Devine, Cassi Davis, Bow Wow.