A nostalgist's film noir, one more black-and-white postwar thriller, over a half-century tardy in its arrival, for the buff who has run through Crossfire, Cornered, Notorious, The Stranger, Berlin Express, and Captain Carey, U.S.A., among numerous others, and who still has a hunger. Reassuring archaisms, such as the 4:3 aspect …
Directed by Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run and The Princess and the Warrior) from an unrealized screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (Red, White, and Blue), this is an apparently harmonious collaboration between a couple of fate-chance-coincidence guys. The extended credits sequence, during which a bomb planted in an office …
An orphaned boy named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is placed in the custody of a Warlock uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) who quickly proceeds to groom the lad in the art of sorcery. With the premise precariously set in place, director Eli Roth relinquishes control to the production designer and special …
An orphaned boy named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is placed in the custody of a Warlock uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) who quickly proceeds to groom the lad in the art of sorcery. With the premise precariously set in place, director Eli Roth relinquishes control to the production designer and special …
An orphaned boy named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is placed in the custody of a Warlock uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) who quickly proceeds to groom the lad in the art of sorcery. With the premise precariously set in place, director Eli Roth relinquishes control to the production designer and special …
Somewhat heavy reading of Oscar Wilde's stage comedy of manners and morals. Julianne Moore, as Mrs. Cheveley, has the role that makes everything go, and she is fully present and alert in it, and her departure before the final act is a grave loss. Rupert Everett seems strangely uncommitted, and …
Todd Haynes blows another cloud of mist into the mystique of Bob Dylan. The filmmaker, who once enlisted Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story, now borrows a gimmick used by Todd Solondz in Palindromes, employing a rotation of dissimilar actors to play a single role, a multiplication of …
Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg rejoin forces, nineteen years later, for a fourth archaeological adventure. Ford, with his big-cat purr of a voice, remains an amiable fellow; and if he’s a bit jowlier beneath that crumpled face (like a wadded-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and mostly smoothed …
With, more factually, Bill Murray in the role of Zissou, an over-the-hill, or over-the-wave, oceanographer cum filmmaker, a cut-rate Cousteau: "What happened to me? Did I lose my talent? Am I ever going to be any good again?" Director Wes Anderson, a critical darling and "indie" bellwether for Bottle Rocket, …
Dr. Tolkien's home-cooked myth. First course only. All manner of visual invention, photographic trickery, computer magic, etc., cannot alter what is in essence an overblown bedtime story. They can only blow it up bigger. And the burden of it is more or less tripled by the knowledge that these three …
Cate Blanchett expertly adopts the personas of derelict, sanitation worker, scientist, housewife, newscaster, elementary schoolteacher, punk rocker, mourner, dance troupe director, puppeteer, society matron, and businesswoman and uses them to deliver excerpts from various classics of the titular form. Many of them have to do with artists and the art …
In 1885 New Mexico, a frontier medicine woman forms an uneasy alliance with her estranged father when her daughter is kidnapped by an Apache brujo. Directed by Ron Howard, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Aaron Eckhart, Val Kilmer, and Evan Rachel Wood.
Women's Western, concerned with a frontier healer (Cate Blanchett) and her relationship issues, her maternal instincts, her sexual urges. One day her estranged and very strange father (Tommy Lee Jones, as "Mr. Jones") turns up on her New Mexico homestead, having long ago gone native and converted himself into a …
What makes the 1946 adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham bleak tale of life far, far under the big top so unique was the curious combination of director Edmund Goulding (acclaimed for such “woman’s pictures” as Grand Hotel and Dark Victory), the backing of a Hollywood major (20th Century Fox), and …