The point of departure is truly inspired: a young Australian woman's religious conversion while on holiday in India, and the scandalized reactions of her middle-class suburban family back home, the most severe of which is to enlist the help of a recommended deprogrammer: "The number-one exit counselor in America." The …
Dramatization of John Bayley's two tributes to his novelist wife, Iris Murdoch: Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris. The back-and-forth between early Iris (Kate Winslet) and Alzheimer's Iris (Judi Dench) keeps the film from ever quite getting going, though there's an undeniable poignancy in the spectacle of a meticulous …
Once you get past the temporary insanity of the premise — escaped killer takes mother and son prisoner in their own home and quickly becomes the lover she craves and the father he needs — the weird sincerity of the performances from Josh Brolin, Kate Winslet, and Gattlin Griffith may …
Preachy, preposterously plotted, ostentatiously overwritten beat-the-clock thriller in which a Texas death-penalty abolitionist finds himself on Death Row. How ironic! How heavily, heavy-handedly, oppressively ironic! Kate Winslet, as a carpetbagging journalist ("Mike Wallace with PMS") looking to reopen the case in the final hours before execution, brings her usual credibility, …
A very little chaos, and more's the pity. Kate Winslet stars in director Alan Rickman's story of a lady landscaper whose willingness to fiddle with man's imposition of order onto nature catches the eye of frustrated the Master Gardener tasked with giving the King of France a foretaste of heaven …
Todd Field's sophomore directing effort, following up his quietly sensationalized In the Bedroom, is less quietly sensationalized, in other words more blaringly sensationalized, and truly more sophomoric. The adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel, complete with a snooty third-person-omniscient (i.e., know-it-all) narrator, undoubtedly tells us less about the malaise of …
With all flights cancelled, a neurosurgeon who’s desperately needed in the ER (Idris Elba) and a journalist en route to her own wedding (Kate Winslet) split the cost of a charter plane, hoping to slip past a pending snowstorm. No sooner do they take off than pilot Beau Bridges earns …
A middle-brow mulling of the issues of free expression and censorship, with the Marquis de Sade as the bone of contention. (Present-day application warmly invited.) The movie does not try to deny literature's potential damage to weak minds -- at least to the extent that a slobbering resident of the …
Stephen Daldry’s tight and trim adaptation of the Bernhard Schlink best-seller on German war guilt and the filial estrangement of the postwar generation. It begins in 1995 in the frigid colorless antiseptic Berlin apartment of Ralph Fiennes, lit by way of Vermeer, but soon it retreats to his adolescence in …
Director Sam Mendes returns to the suburban stamping ground of his filmmaking debut, American Beauty, but at the very opening of that territory in the 1950s, at the inception, that is to say, of all the clichés of cookie-cutter conformity, Little Boxes, the Lonely Crowd, lives of quiet desperation, and …
John Turturro, in his director's hat, dips into lip-sync musical fantasy in the proletarian mode of Pennies from Heaven (or the more rarefied and bourgeois Same Old Song of Alain Resnais), with minor modifications: the people engage in raunchier talk, and instead of simply mouthing the words to old pop …
From the Jane Austen shelf, a cinematic Classics Illustrated. And altogether an agreeable comedy of manners, though hardly on course to become a classic in its own right. In its own medium, to be more precise. Ang Lee, of Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet, is the perhaps …
Having treated the man who put life online — Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — screenwriter Aaron Sorkin now turns his attention to the man who put it into the machine. (Not for nothing is the Apple co-founder so desperate to have the Mac say "Hello" at its unveiling.) Once again, …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …