A fine performance — and a good character — in search of a story. Silken-maned Robert Carlyle plays an aging former rocker, haunted by the death of his brother (his old band's frontman) and living in self-imposed exile on a farm in California. It's a tolerable, static, hidden sort of …
In the professional gamblers' circuit, from the Santa Anita track to the Reno casinos, Robert Altman has again selected a fortuitous stretch of terrain to survey. However, he seems unable to find much that interests or makes sense to him there, and he sweeps aside most of the gambling scene …
West Coast transplant of Plaza Suite is second-gear Neil Simon, a quartet of sketches allowing for a slew of Southern California jokes ("It's like paradise with a lobotomy") and moving progressively into lower and lower comedy. Simon is on his happiest level in the one with Maggie Smith as a …
History, sentiment, and inventiveness intertwine in this stylishly crafted love letter to the children of inventor Christopher Latham Sholes. You never forget your first. Mine was a beat up Royal originally owned by Millie, the young college student whose bedroom sat opposite me in the courtyard. For years, I fell …
The most cryptic credits on any movie ever. The dismissed director, Tinto Brass, is credited only with Principal Photography (not to be confused with Director of Photography), while the final Editing is attributed to an impersonal Kafkaesque entity identified as "the production." The script is proclaimed to be Adapted from …
Academy Award-winning former Bond girl Halle Berry wagers her reputation on a shameless "teen-in-trunk" exploitation drama, playing a veteran LAPD 911 operator plagued with guilt after her accidental redial alerts a killer to the victim’s whereabouts. Naturally, she gets a second shot at the same killer, and as implausible as …
Sensibly scaled portrait of the Greek soprano, captured well past her prime, when she was involved in a project of dubious artistic integrity, lip-syncing on film to an earlier recording of Carmen. Fanny Ardant, as dark and dramatic-looking as the real diva, conveys the appropriate amount of passion -- which …
Did George Van Tassel vanish after experimenting with a time machine of his own design? Jonathan Berman's documentary tries to find an answer.
Director Luca Guadagnino’s sunnily seductive ode to eros tells the story of a summer romance between 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet, looking 15) and 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer, looking 30). Or rather, it explores the dynamics between them, operating at a cool remove from its own frank depiction of desperate teenage …
Jack London’s semi-autobiographical The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, was based on an arduous year the author spent in the Yukon, looking to find a cure for Gold Rush fever — a time when a man’s best friend was his sled dog. The novel was told from the …
Harrison Ford stars opposite a computer generated dog... or is it a live-action dog working with a replicant? Time will tell.
Calvary presents the viewer with a very particular week in the life of a small-town priest in modern Ireland. Father James — played with thickened, toughened, but still lively and sharp-witted humanity by Brendan Gleeson — labors, as we all do, under a sentence of death. The difference in his …
The dream had been bobbing around in Torren Martyn and Aiyana Powell’s heads for a year or two. It seemed pretty simple: learn how to sail, then acquire a boat and head off on an adventure exploring waves in exotic locations.
It is not altogether easy to do such an uninteresting version of such an invincible story as the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot affair. One slight handicap here is the cast (Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero), none of whom can sing, but all of whom engage in some intense competition to exhibit the …