Your mother, father, and sister will thank you for seeing this biopic of George M. Cohan starring James Cagney.
The British homefront in the Second World War, invaded by an army of Americans who appear to have nothing to do with their days but pursue leisurely romances with the abandoned wives, fiancés, and girlfriends of limey soldiers. It's rather nice, as cautious and slow-to-develop as they are, how much ...
Modestly budgeted little crime film traces the well-worn path of the ex-con who wants to go straight but who veers off under bad influence -- in this case into the unsexy world of corruption in the commuter-rail industry around New York City: bribery, kickbacks, intimidation, and, when necessary, rougher stuff. ...
At 114 minutes, this Year only feels like a decade. It's goopy, by-the-numbers woman’s pictures like this that give melodramas a bad name. Hoping to resume her career as a writer, a defiant Karen Allen thinks the time is right for a brief separation from her overbearing husband (Michael Cristofer). ...
A sentimental, in the sense of maudlin, education. A young boy from Belo Horizonte, dropped off in the Jewish section of São Paulo to live with his grandfather while his dissident parents go underground, discovers that gramps has just died and he’ll have to watch the 1970 World Cup in ...
The old story of the objective reporter learning to get involved. In this particular telling, the setting is Indonesia, 1965, on the eve of Sukarno's showdown with the Communists. The telling itself is uncommonly muddy: i.e., hard to make out, easy to get stuck in and spin your wheels in. ...
Vaporous romantic-comic adventure revolving around a bottle of Bordeaux of 1811 vintage. Penelope Ann Miller is très charmante as the novice wine expert ("This is just the most exciting thing ever in my life"); Timothy Daly leaves something to be desired as the man -- the Bud man, by preference ...
Offbeat comedy (meaning that the audience is not orchestrated into fortissimo laughter, but left, as it were, to play by ear) revolving around a fortyish dog-loving spinster who loses a dog, acquires and loses another one, acquires and loses fifteen more, and finally finds a new self. Part of that ...
A sort of Chinese Godfather, set in New York's Chinatown. In the interest of cultural documentation, there is a lot of laboriously expository dialogue played in the snappy, snappish manner of a Sidney Lumet movie, a Serpico or a Prince of the City. But we are not given nearly enough ...
It's gonna be like Day of the Jackal, General De Gaulle mixed up with fictional characters. Thus the journalist hero describes his secret writing project. The description fits the movie around him as well, except it's former Prime Minister Aldo Moro mixed up with fictional Italian terrorists in the year ...
Jim Jarmusch's bouquet to rocker Neil Young (also composer of the soundtrack to Jarmusch's Dead Man) and his loyal band, Crazy Horse. It is assembled, or thrown together, from recent European concert footage, candid backstage or offstage stuff dating back twenty years, formal interviews in a barren room with a ...