It's straight downhill from the title, a decorous double entendre referring at once to the heroine's paid escort and to the social occasion to which she is being escorted -- her baby sister's nuptials. The reason for the escort -- to enable the heroine to hold up her head in …
A Martin-and-Lewis comedy team of debonair Britisher and antic Jersey Jew breaks up after their Veterans Day Polio Telethon in 1957, when an unexplained naked dame turns up dead in their hotel suite; and fifteen years later, the Miracle Girl of that telethon, now an investigative cub reporter, reopens the …
A James Ivory film, and a posthumous film for his longtime producer Ismail Merchant, on which their longtime screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was supplanted by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Remains of the Day yielded one of the better Ivory-Merchant-Jhabvala collaborations. The present collaboration is not nearly as good, which …
Serious-minded, studiously researched occult thriller on the topic of EVP, short for Electronic Voice Phenomena. Or in plain words, communication from the Other Side through household appliances and gadgets. Sitting in front of a bank of AV equipment, looking at snowy screens and listening to staticky speakers, does not make …
The title, together with a tiny fraction of the footage, comes from Frank Capra's series of seven WWII propaganda films. The reappropriation is, needless to say, ironic. Eugene Jarecki, maker of The Trials of Henry Kissinger, adduces no less definite reasons why, just less noble ones. In a nutshell: the …
Human-interest documentary, and avian-interest, about an unemployed San Francisco musician, Mark Bittner, who tends a flock of cherry-headed conures, plus one outcast blue-crown conure by the name of Connor (they all have names), who is quite a character. Lightly engaging most of the way, with all of the wrenching saved …
A womanless household -- the Winters family -- composed of two strapping boys and a morose widower. Tepid domestic drama with warm-blooded performances from Anthony LaPaglia, Aaron Stanford, Mark Webber, Allison Janney, Michelle Monaghan. Some amusing human observation fights through the pallid image and New Age-y music. E.g., after fielding …
Unsolved Mysteries, Australian-style, from tyro filmmaker Greg McLean. A malevolent Crocodile Dundee ("Now that's a knife," or rather, "Nah thet's a knoif") is postulated to explain the disappearance of two pretty British backpackers in the Outback. And untold others besides. Wretched, low-budget, psycho-boogeyman antics, more exasperating than exciting. Cassandra Magrath, …
Roger Donaldson's indulgent, ingratiating character sketch of New Zealander Burt Munro (an oddly cast Anthony Hopkins, feigning extroversion), on a mid-Sixties pilgrimage to the hallowed ground of the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, where, battling a bad heart and a bad prostate, he hopes to set a land-speed record on his …
The former triple-X (Vin Diesel, that would be) has been killed, off-screen, in Bora-Bora. "The new triple-X," muses his old boss, Samuel L. Jackson, "has gotta be more dangerous, deadlier, more attitude." Enter Ice Cube, straight from nine years in lockdown, a James Bond from the Hood (and a hammeringly …
Two old flames, a Coast Guard Admiral and a free-lance designer, both widowed, reignite in later life, after he has got eight well-drilled children and she's got an anarchic Rainbow Coalition of ten (four biological, six adopted). That's a lot of kids when they all act with sitcom aggressiveness and …
Relatively speaking, an imaginative children's film (from a book by Chris Van Allsburg, author also of The Polar Express and, more relevantly, Jumanji) about two battling brothers from a broken home, ages ten and six-and-three-quarters, who find themselves adrift in outer space inside the "creaky" old house of their absent …