A bearably dull Christmas worship service, fully supernatural in its vision (the voice of God, a luminous Messenger, an avian Holy Spirit), yet full of luxuriously tactile costumes, solid sets, atmospheric locales, and earthy Mediterranean faces. (The half-Maori Keisha Castle-Hughes, though harmoniously olive in complexion, seems a bit overwhelmed in …
Director, or on this occasion documentarist, Jonathan Demme fumbles through ten minutes of perfunctory interviews with the headliner and his fellow musicians, wretchedly shot in the interiors of cars and elevators, before settling down for nearly an hour and a half of well-recorded concert footage at the Ryman in Nashville. …
Jumanji-esque jumble of special effects, in which all the exhibits at the Natural History Museum in New York City come to life after dark. This allows for a lot of, frankly an excess of, variety: Lilliputian cowboys and Roman soldiers who tie down the new night watchman like Gulliver; a …
A jilted homosexual, the morose host of a national AIDS-awareness radio show, transfers his emotions, at long distance, onto a terminally ill pedophilia victim and his adoptive mother, but then, despite speaking to him repeatedly on the telephone, he comes to doubt the boy's existence. The intriguing premise (from an …
Two thespian heavyweights, Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, going toe to toe, battling to a draw. The scandal, as it comes to light, is the illicit and illegal affair of a married-with-children, thirty-something art teacher, Blanchett, and a fifteen-year-old male student (Andrew Simpson), a ripped-from-the-headlines affair made perfectly plausible if …
Unworthy biopic on "the pin-up queen of the universe," a brief reign in the mid-Fifties, until a congressional hearing on pornography sent her down the path of repentance, into the sheltering arms of Jesus. Gretchen Mol is game enough in the posing sessions, and has her own kind of vulnerability …
An hour-long documentary tribute to a remarkable legend who mastered the worlds of surfing, sailing and soaring.
The feature debut of ad director Billy Kent is an "indie" sex comedy as crassly commercial as possible with Parker Posey and Paul Rudd in the lead roles instead of, say, Jennifer Aniston and Ben Stiller. The couple in their public lives are, respectively, a Cleveland P.R. flack ("What was …
Calculatingly released in theaters on 06/06/06 (i.e., 666, get it?), but not, heaven forbid, a fourth sequel, an Omen 5, but rather a straight remake of the 1976 original, about the advent of the anti-Christ (presaged now by the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004) …
The story may well be extraordinary, but a full appreciation of it will demand an extraordinary interest, or at any rate an above-average interest, in American sports and/or American entrepreneurialism. The story, in short, of the efforts of the late Steve Ross, the Mr. Big of Warner Communications, to legitimize …
A population of computer-cartoon Cute Critters, plasticky, foam-rubbery, styrofoamy, and styled to please the eye of the pre-schooler, teaches the lesson that oneness beats aloneness. There are some elaborate and well-timed visual gags, pretty awful to look at nonetheless. The buzzed-up squirrel, not unlike the squirrel in the first Ice …
Slow-cooking revenge tale from France, and from hitherto unknown director Denis Dercourt. The heroine, as a little girl and aspiring pianist, gets thrown off in her scholarship audition when one of the judges, a female pianist of some renown, takes time out in mid-performance to sign an autograph. Right then …
Somerset Maugham's middlebrow brew of sin and redemption among colonial Brits in mid-Twenties China, where a brave bacteriologist but vindictive cuckold (Edward Norton) drags his faithless spouse (Naomi Watts) into the midst of a cholera outbreak in the backcountry. The spiritual growth of the flighty wife ("When love and duty …
Guillermo del Toro, the migrant Mexican filmmaker, returns to the place and time of his Spanish Civil War ghost story, The Devil's Backbone, more precisely post-Civil War, mid-WWII. He centers on a preadolescent girl (wide-eyed, plump-lipped Ivana Baquero) chided by her nine-months-pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil, very intense) as too old …
Athletic inspirationalism by way of the Buddhist school of thought, a dizzyingly loopy path. The slo-mo nightmare of a world-class gymnast -- drops of perspiration detonating at the volume of thunder, his right leg shattering like crystal on his dismount from the rings -- comes more or less true, and …