The running time is a minute or two shy of an hour and twenty, less a few more for the opening and closing credits. It would be nice to be able to say that this is the result of ruthless enforcement of the strictest creative standards. What can instead be …
If it's not quite the Snow White retelling we've all been waiting for, it's certainly closer than some. For nearly its entire running time, Blanca Nieves feels like a bona fide fairy tale, the sort the Brothers Grimm might have collected had they been doing their work in 1920s Spain. …
An inflationary Home Alone. Our flowering youth this time out is a millionaire home owner -- the million isn't really his, but the home is -- and the beleaguering bad guys are big league (Miguel Ferrer, Tone Loc, who deserve a better nemesis). Coincidence runs wild, but not as wild …
An indie documentary about the underground indie-film craze in New York City in the late ’70s — sort of a low-budget SparkNote to the big bang of Super 8. The archive footage is expectedly atrocious, but it does garner some nostalgia for the time — the outlaw attitude, the financially …
Superhero spoof about a nerdy black man who only seems mentally retarded, even (or especially) in his "secret identity" as a masked and caped "crimefighter," but who's actually an electronics wizard with the s-f gadgetry to prove it. The humor infrequently rises to silliness (the hero humming "background music" to …
On-the-run documentary about American paparazzi, mainly one Victor Malafronte, a conscienceless mercenary if there ever was. (Invasion of privacy? "I don't ever think about questions like that.") Sketchy and superficial, the movie itself stands not on the outside, but right in the thick, of the celebrity hunt: the motion-picture camera …
A paranoid scientist takes his pregnant wife into a gymnasium-sized fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis and, under the impression the bombs have begun to drop, waits thirty-five years for the radiation to blow over. Boy, is the joke ever on them: there never was a bomb, only an …
Having played real-life artist Chet Baker in 2015’s Born to Be Blue, the spouse to real-life artist Maud Lewis in 2016’s Maudie, and fictional artist Tucker Crowe in his year’s Juliet, Naked, Ethan Hawke continues scratching his artisty itch by directing and co-writing a biopic of Blaze Foley that feels …
Leading off with fiery credits in the color of cheddar cheese and a whip-cracking parody of Frankie Laine's Rawhide theme song, Mel Brooks bursts onto the Western plains; but the terrain gives way, unpredictably, and opens up to allow any whim: a street brawl that spills across the Warner Brothers …
Leading off with fiery credits in the color of cheddar cheese and a whip-cracking parody of Frankie Laine's Rawhide theme song, Mel Brooks bursts onto the Western plains; but the terrain gives way, unpredictably, and opens up to allow any whim: a street brawl that spills across the Warner Brothers …
It’s Rocky joins the Head Injury Club for Men in this half sports/half disease-of-the-week biopic of world “champeen” pugilist Vinny Pazienza. After a head-on collision finds “Paz’s” sawbones fitting him for a Halo vest, his spirit and determination… Must I go on? The trailer offered a Viewer’s Digest condensed version, …
Jackie Chan stars in Lijia Zhang's action/sch-fi/thriller about a special forces agent who fights to protect a young woman (one suspects another of Chan's woefully underdeveloped female characters) from a sinister criminal gang.
Rudolfo Anaya's coming-of-age story, set in 1940s New Mexico, never comes close to escaping its novelistic origins — do we really need a narrator to tell us that wise old woman Ultima "taught me to listen to the living earth and to feel complete in the mystery of its time"? …