A ruthless film producer steals a kid's English composition and transforms it into his next blockbuster: a dose of Hollywood self-loathing for the whole family. There's no harm in it, surely, and plenty of pep. Paul Giamatti, in the part of the producer, slathers the relish on the hot dog. …
Big bore. Tim Burton, to inhibit erosion of his "fan base," needed to bounce back in a big way from the commercial conservatism of Planet of the Apes, and in Daniel Wallace's slender novel he has found a fund of peculiarity: the sententious and sentimental memoirs of an Alabama fabulist, …
At the heart of this up-to-date private eye caper is the question, Whatever happened to the student radicals of the Sixties? And the several given answers are not lacking in humor, nor in sentimentalism for the good old days of peace marches, SDS meetings, and such. That one of these …
Football live
Fueled by an impoverished childhood, George Foreman channeled his anger into becoming an Olympic Gold medalist and World Heavyweight Champion, followed by a near-death experience that took him from the boxing ring to the pulpit. Directed by George Tillman Jr. from a story by Dan Gordon and Frank Baldwin and …
Director George Gallo (29th Street, Trapped in Paradise returns after too long of an absence with this biopic of brothers Joe and Ben Weider, the architects of bodybuilding.
Four damaged souls in various stages of recovery — filmmaker Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) from depression and booze, rock star Marianne (Tilda Swinton) from damaged vocal cords, nymphet Penelope (Dakota Johnson) from fatherlessness, and record producer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) from, well, his life up to now — meet up at an …
David Hockney at work, and at a romantic crossroads with his lover and model, Peter Schlesinger. The balance is quite the reverse of what it is in most movies on artists: the details of his evolving art are far more gripping than those of his personal life, though of course …
Christopher Bell’s documentary on steroid use in the U.S., mainly in athletics, and candidly in his own family (brothers “Mad Dog” and “Smelly”). Not a polished or thorough presentation, but neither is it a pat, open-and-shut presentation. It is judiciously two-sided, with a hard look at the hypocrisies of the …
A splendid commercial — as opposed to argument — for small-scale biodiversity as an effective operative principle for a family farm in Southern California. (Translation: although farming necessarily involves imposition on the natural world, the closer you get to being just one more strand in the ecological web, the better.) …