Trivia experts will instantly peg Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s as the title splashed across the Radio City Music Hall marquee while Michael Corleone and his future bride, Kay, do their Christmas shopping in The Godfather. McCarey’s Bells really has more in common with Coppola’s second installment, inasmuch …
The use of elective sterilization as a cost-effective method of contraception inside women’s prisons sounds like something out of a sequel to Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom. But inside the belly of documentarian Erika Cohn’s Beast lurks a monstrosity more appalling than horror fiction. The concept of purifying the human …
Beloved asks the question, Why bring AIDS and 9/11 to an otherwise affectionate musical tribute to the films of Jacques Demy? Is it because the director felt the need to rely on the two greatest tragedies in recent history to add depth to his otherwise flimsy characters and plotline?
John Belushi could milk more laughter with a slight shift of the eyebrow than most comedians can with a pratfall. He transformed slobbery into an art form, and sewed danger into the heart of each gag. You’re familiar with talking heads documentaries, that effortless approach to filmmaking that transforms interview …
A picture-postcard mutoscope flips us backwards through time, from modern day Hollywood to Fort Lee, NJ (cinema’s original hub), all the way back to a crowded Paris theatre, where, in 1895, Alice Guy-Blaché bore witness the birth of cinema. She was the first woman director, yet not even filmmaker and …
Leave it to Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delight, Basic Instinct) to set an erotic thriller inside a convent. Don’t let the bird poop and fart jokes that open the picture throw you. It’s his way of distracting audiences from the corporeal abominations that await. Verhoeven’s role in this fact-based 17th Century …
If the Chuck Heston interpretation is comparable to a Classics Illustrated comic book, MGM’s new digital facelift should never have left Turner Network Television. This Ben hurt! Running 90 minutes shorter than its predecessor — the Jack Hawkins subplot didn’t make the cut — the film feels twice as long. …
It’s a case of “different message, same actor” as Lucas Hedges trades in one important theme for another and goes from a boy erased to a beautiful boy addict. Mom (Julia Roberts) returns from church on Christmas Eve to find Ben (Hedges), her semi-rehabbed son, anxiously vaping on the front …
An agreeable R-rated rom-com turns into a high-handed sentimental tear-jerker before piously wasting away. It’s time we sue Universal for false advertising. The breezy trailer for Malcolm Lee’s follow-up to his 1999 hit, The Best Man, promises “All the sex, all the secrets, all the surprises,” and none of the …
A female, powerfully outspoken African-American civil rights activist convinced the winner of the 1971 Ku Klux Klan award for Exalted Cyclops of the Year (aka the Oscars of hate) to vote in favor of desegregation. Taraji P. Henson stars as Ann Atwater, the community organizer who gradually thaws to the …
Boy from the wrong side of the tracks (played at varying ages by Luke Bracey and James Marsden) falls for rich man’s daughter (Liana Liberato/Michelle Monaghan). An inability to divine where this timeworn premise might lead makes you the perfect audience demographic. Nicholas Sparks’ notion of destiny is two different …
What happens when the screen becomes a lectern. Without benefit of so much as one acclimatizing image or inaugural character to provide footing, even before a title hits the screen the filmmaker’s intent is clearly spelled out for us: “School bullying is a worldwide phenomenon… We hope this film will …
What happens when the screen becomes a lectern. Without benefit of so much as one acclimatizing image or inaugural character to provide footing, even before a title hits the screen the filmmaker’s intent is clearly spelled out for us: “School bullying is a worldwide phenomenon… We hope this film will …