Pretty, for sure, in Stuart Dryburgh's glossy photography. A parentless Vietnamese peasant, shunned in his picturesque village as "bui doi" ("less than dust," the term reserved for children of American fathers), tracks down his mother in the big city, where she works as a housemaid for an old crab who …
As the sun fades on the Twilight series, Hollywood sets its sights on another stretch of successful teen Harlequin Romances. Gatlin, South Carolina is the type of place people can leave only after they die. A group of "casters" (don’t call them witches) transform the town and an otherwise handsomely …
For those who've seen Won't You Be My Neighbor was this biopic really necessary?
Travis Maddox (Dylan Sprouse) is exactly what college freshman Abby Abernathy (Virginia Gardner) needs and wants—to avoid. He spends his nights fighting in underground boxing matches, and his days as the ultimate college campus charmer. But Abby wants nothing to do with Travis. Intrigued by Abby’s resistance to his appeal, …
Frugal and fact-based Canadian period production concerning the involvement of Walt Whitman as guru figure in the reform of an insane asylum in London, Ontario, and as feather-ruffler of the local dodos. It is quick to tut-tut over the obstinacy with which men of the 19th Century hold to the …
A supposed "showcase" for a large ensemble of New Generation actors, not all of them as new as they need to be for their ten-year high-school reunion (in the dead of the Massachusetts winter!). Scott Rosenberg's glib, stilted, writerly dialogue -- to do with the ongoing growing pains at the …
Laundered biography of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and madman, John Forbes Nash, Jr. It's his madness, of course, and not his math, that makes him a viable screen subject, and director Ron Howard nurtures it with care. (And with more taste and restraint than are his custom.) But between the …
The melting pot of modern London, with special accommodation for emigrés of the Balkans (origin of the writer and director, Jasmin Dizdar). One of the plotlines -- wherein a young heroin addict curls up on a cargo crate at the airport and wakes up in Bosnia -- outpulls the rest, …
Earth, as seen from space.
"Hello, world; it's nice to meet you." Earth from space. Narrated by Jennifer Lawrence.
Above-averagely attractive thing, more like. Good-looking thing, for sure, with some of the deepest, wettest, Pop Artiest reds and blues seen on screen since the 1960s work of Jean-Luc Godard (or of Jerry Lewis). The first film of Hettie Macdonald, who had directed the original Jonathan Harvey play on the …
Abby and Travis wake up after a crazy night in Vegas as accidental newlyweds and travel to Mexico for a wild, weird honeymoon. Directed by: Roger Kumble, starring Dylan Sprouse, Virginia Gardener, Austin North, and Rob Estes.
Comparisons — to Disney’s first live-action princess movie remake (2015’s Cinderella) and to the 1991 animated tale of a Beauty who wants “much more than this provincial life” (and the Beast who must win her heart if he is to recover his humanity) — may not be unavoidable, but they …
The Disney people, perhaps because their five-year recycling program causes them to lag behind the rising social consciousness and thus opens them to attack from assorted interest groups (Indians re Peter Pan, feminists re Cinderella), seem now, with their thirtieth feature-length cartoon, to spend as much time on Proper Attitudes …