A retro "woman's picture" more than a modern "chick flick," Ben Sombogaart's fact-based film is like a nostalgic collector's set of cherished movie types. Three young women bond on a postwar flight from Holland to New Zealand. They then share crises, a lover, even a baby, as each finds her …
A trust fun kid needs to get married to get at his money, and needs his money to take on his father in the business world. A pretty girl needs rent money to keep her family off the street. Maybe they can work something out! Like, she pretends to be …
Certainly not the only, but perhaps the single greatest, exception to the rule about sequels never surpassing their forerunners. A lively and densely packed hour and a quarter, overrun by an unsuppressed sense of humor, it begins with a one-stormy-night prologue in which the story is resumed by Mary Shelley …
An ageless (over a period of two decades) Alma Mahler, née Schindler, and her constellation of artsy swains: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, the writer Franz Werfel. The viewer is expected to swoon at the headiness of it all: the name-dropping ("Strauss loved …
The Evelyn Waugh novel revisited, at roughly a fourth the length of the early-Eighties TV miniseries. Matthew Goode, as the self-professed atheist artist Charles Ryder, murmurs his way through the pages of a radical rewrite (particularly the gay abandon): first year at Oxford, the tormented Catholics of Brideshead manor, Venice, …
Subpar Chabrol, a further cure for the mindless habit of affixing to his work the label of "a Chabrol thriller," let alone "a Hitchcockian thriller." Despite its origins (same as those of his La Cérémonie) in the oeuvre of the incomparable Ruth Rendell, it little resembles a thriller of any …
A raunchy comedy with integrity from star and cowriter Kristen Wiig. The movie is unquestionably from a female perspective, a quality that is pervasive but never exclusive. Wiig plays Annie, a heart-ravaged, recession-broken middle-ager struggling to maintain an emotional parallel with her best friend whose life is on the up-and-up. …
Through a booking mix-up, two “inseparable” girlfriends are locked into simultaneous June weddings at the Plaza Hotel, whereupon they take leave of their senses in their efforts to sabotage one another. A deviously insulting chick flick. Anne Hathaway, although she looks like she’s in training for a concentration-camp film, doesn’t …
Leslie Cheung plays Zhuo Yihang, a rebellious but extremely talented swordsman of the Wudang Sect (aka the Wu-Tang Clan, a fictional martial arts sect that appears in many wuxia novels and films). One day he meets and falls in love with Lian Nichang (Lin), the adopted daughter of a rival …
Call it Mr. Donovan goes to East Berlin. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks team up for a handsome piece of very pointed nostalgia (with help from the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman, who handled the script, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, lens set to "stately."). Hanks is private citizen and shrewd …
Clint Eastwood grappling, both behind and in front of the camera, with the Robert James Waller bestseller about a four-day affair between a nomadic National Geographic photographer and an Italian-Iowan farm wife (Meryl Streep). Whatever has been or could be said about this being an American Brief Encounter, and about …
Sharon Maguire brings 2001's It Girl back to the big screen: this time, instead of choosing between lovers, she must choose between fathers. Of her baby.
Sharon Maguire's pale and wan visualization of the unfunny non-novel by Helen Fielding, about the plight of the average, over-thirty, ever so slightly overweight, overdrinking, and oversmoking "singleton" woman in a world -- or in a United Kingdom, at least -- of male "fuckwits." Attempts to punch up the humor …
A case of ill-advised expansionism, not so much (or not just) in the sense of Renée Zellweger packing the pounds back on (without polishing up her English accent), but in the sense of a modestly profitable corner cookie store envisioning itself as the next Mrs. Fields. Granted, it's well within …