The re-staging of Operation Market Garden, the Allies' ill-conceived attempt to capture a string of Nazi-occupied Dutch bridges, takes three hours on screen, and the complex logistics of the attack seem sufficient in themselves to hold your interest for that long. But the chief reason for the film's largeness is …
The children's story by Katherine Paterson brings together two junior-high pariahs, a picked-on "artistic" farmboy, solitary brother of four sisters, and a new girl next door, imaginative daughter of two novelists, and sends them off into a woodsy fantasyland of their own making, across the creek on a rope swing. …
David Lean directs Noel Coward's story about a chance meeting between two happily married strangers.
Errol Morris ushers us into the world, or at least over its doorsill, of English cosmologist Stephen Hawking, stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) in his early twenties, losing the use of his body and eventually his voice, and now getting around in a motorized wheelchair and communicating …
Vittorio De Sica's second-to-last movie, released post-humously. The blue-collar heroine, tubercular, is packed off, for a breather from family and factory, to a breathtaking mountaintop sanatorium, and just as she embarks on an extramarital romance with a fellow patient she is pronounced fit and sent back home. Out of this …
The coming-of-age rite with a distinct literary flavor: Richard Ford has pieced together the screenplay from a couple of his own short stories, and the resulting creation has an unorganic quality, a lurching, Frankenstein's-monster quality. Lili Taylor, as a young woman of dubious character who is on a mission to …
Faster than a dozen chickens looking to fly the coop! More powerful than a fist halting a whirling lawnmower blade! Able to bend sharp fork tines with a single chomp! Yes, it's the work of Directorman (David Yarovesky), strange appropriator of intellectual property who, along with screenwriters Brian Gunn and …
It's important to distinguish between your skills and your interests. Being handsome and successful and beloved is not necessarily a skill.
A movie completely absorbed by a man completely absorbed by himself -- fringed with some so-what details about the dragging-down drug scene, the death of a parent, a broken love bond, and life at a New Yorker-ish magazine pseudonymously called Gotham. In the last-named arena, Jason Robards salvages a few …
Rather more yellowness, actually, than brightness, at least on the visual level. The narrative is even dimmer, a father-son conflict involving magic poison, a magic post, a magic necklace, a magic prism, a magic bone, a magic this, a magic that. The magic all works, but it doesn't "play." Directed …
Selected as the Georgian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, the movie unfolds story of Georgian wrestler, Kakhi, who travels to Brooklyn to help his son out of a gambling debt. Directed by Levan Koguashvili and cinematography by Academy Award nominee Phedon Papamichael. With …
Better than average Neil Simon piece, perhaps because a semi-autobiographical one -- like, for instance, the above-average and semi-autobiographical Chapter Two. The Neil Simon character here is a sex-starved teenager (and would-be either writer or New York Yankee) in the Brooklyn of 1937, but the author sees the entire household …
Faith-based musical about a group of kids from a performing arts school who put together a musical, in their own backyard, that teaches the world how they were created to shine.
Rowan Joffe wrote and directed this adaptation of the Graham Greene novel about warring mobster gangs in England, circa 1964. The crime element is merely backdrop to the film’s real interest, a dysfunctional love story between a psychotic young mob boss and a sheltered waitress, desperate to be his moll. …
As recounted by Jane Campion, unusually taking sole screenwriting credit in addition to directing, the ill-starred love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne is such as to make us ask ourselves when we last had on screen a love story we could believe in. (In the Mood for Love, …