Pop musical from the Australian stage: Aborigines, hippies, vagabonds, a German-accented racist priest, out on the open road, circa 1969. It does not, let’s just say, travel well. Broad as the Pacific; grotesquely, gruesomely overplayed. With Rocky McKenzie, Jessica Mauboy, Ernie Dingo, Missy Higgins, Tom Budge, and Geoffrey Rush; directed …
The hundred-year-old extracurricular brass band of Grimley Colliery marches proudly toward "Albert Bloody Hall" on the competitive circuit, even as the mine itself faces closure. The filmmakers are too disheartened by Thatcherism to do an out-and-out comedy in the old Ealing Studios style, but their indomitable-human-spirit sentiments prevent a complete …
Was the death of General Patton the result of a mere motor accident, or was he in fact struck down by a high-powered rubber bullet which snapped his neck, without puncturing his skin, at the precise instant his car collided with a strategically parked truck, thus falling victim to a …
A down-on-her-luck ditz (Juno Temple) filches a teapot from a rural antique shop, only to discover that the 2000-year-old boiler -- branded with a Star of David and once owned by Hitler -- is cursed. The more pain inflicted on its owner, the longer the stream of hundred dollar bills …
With another wild-haired royal at the helm (and only one-tenth of Tangled’s wit, charm, and stereoscopic invention), Pixar’s latest amounts to little more than Rapunzel redux. What begins as a standard Disney fairy princess outing takes a turn for the better halfway through, when a magic spell converts one of …
Three-hour epic, directed by and starring Mel Gibson, forged from the pages of Scottish history (turn of the 13th Century) that deal with William Wallace, a personage who emerges in this account as part Spartacus (the band of guerrillas that grows to an army), part Jesse James or Josey Wales …
Distaff Death Wish, though it would not be strictly accurate to say that Jodie Foster is playing Charles Bronson. The emphasis is on her psychological wounds after her fiancé is beaten to death and she herself beaten to death's door -- setting up a take-back-the-night feminist revenge story -- and …
When Mr. Deen discovers one of his students has been living out of his car and thrown into jail, he decides to bail him out. Determined to curb Nate's self-destructive behavior, Mr. Deen discovers a host of secrets that are slowly tearing Nate apart. Starring Jared Harris.
A former boxer-turned-drug runner lands in a prison battleground after a deal gets deadly. Directed and written by S. Craig Zahler, starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Carpenter.
The time-setting of this “Orwellian” (as we have all been instructed to call it) future is identified at the outset as “somewhere in the Twentieth Century,” and it is in fact both forward and backward from the present, laden with 1940s clothes and appliances, but further advanced into bureaucratic decadence …
With his follow-up to Shattered Glass, director Billy Ray has made a good start on a pet theme, the human, or peculiarly American, proclivity for deceit. The first, you will recall, told the factual story of the fabricating journalist, Stephen Glass, of The New Republic. This second tells the factual …
A Little Man comedy, Italian-style, not many doors down from Charlie Chaplin and Charley Chase. Each of the tribulations of an immigrant laborer in Switzerland is underlined, encircled, starred, and arrowed, as if with thick black marking pencil, so that you have the urge to clean up the picture with …
Special pleading on behalf of nonunion janitors, mostly immigrant, in a downtown L.A. high-rise. British filmmaker Ken Loach has lost a little complexity, a little reality, in his move to a new neighborhood: Eisensteinian caricatures of bosses and fat cats; a meet-cute and "sweet" romance between the Anglo activist and …