An anomaly, maybe an antilogy: a Sylvester Stallone film for critics. Written and directed by James Mangold (of the low-budget independent Heavy), it is a Sidney Lumet-style expose of police misconduct, in which the action star sets out as a resigned sideline-sitter, an overweight wannabe cop, hampered with one bad …
Bill Couturié's documentary compilation of archive footage and oral readings of letters from the Vietnam front lines. The only serious false notes in it -- the too discriminatingly hip selections of goldie-oldies are not seriously false -- are the suavely "professional" speaking voices of the narrators (Robert De Niro, Michael …
Michael Cimino's Vietnam War story centers around an "ours not to reason why" trio of mindlessly patriotic Middle Americans from a small Pennsylvania steel town. Three hours long, in the tradition of bigness established by the Second World War stories of Norman Mailer, James Jones, Herman Wouk, and Irwin Shaw, …
Perhaps the oddest duck in the flock that included Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese — i.e., the lucky ducks who got to express very personal visions with studio-level backing back in the ‘70s — sits down and looks back on his career as a director, …
Johnny Knoxville did it better. A career military nutjob (Robert De Niro) observes his future granddaughter-in-law texting at his wife’s funeral and decides a Hangover-style road trip is just what his uptight grandson (Zac Efron) needs to derail the pending nuptials. The script rat-a-tats like a gatling gun misfiring one …
Robert M. Young, who thought it was a good idea to film Miguel Pinero's play Short Eyes, makes an even bigger mistake with this William Mastrosimone piece. It begins at the level of the average slasher film: first some cross-cutting between a sinister motorcyclist (opaque visor, snakeskin boot) and his …
Code names, those are, of two young Americans, one an amateur falconer and National Security employee, the other a drug dealer and user, who sell state secrets to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. John Schlesinger's version of Robert Lindsey's nonfiction best-seller provides adequate information on the how and the …
Brief Encounter on the Manhattan commuter train -- but not all that brief after all, and without anything like Noel Coward's verbal facility. Michael Christofer's underwritten script maneuvers the characters fairly cleverly into place, but then gives them nothing much to do or say once there. A glaring oversight, this, …
Do you remember when the prospect of Robert De Niro in a mob-related movie was a little bit thrilling? No? Oh, well. Maybe go rent The Freshman, which has Brando doing the same sort of self-mocking turn as De Niro does here. Then you can have an argument about which …
Rancidly cheesy psychological thriller whose title character is a philosophizing baseball nut (his motto: "Perfection and principles") fixated on the San Francisco Giants' new $40 million outfielder with a .310 lifetime average. But "psychological" is a very loose collar on this thriller; "ornamental" would be snugger. Director Tony Scott (Top …
The latest (and greatest) from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12, I Am Not a Hipster) is a moving melodrama graced by an insider sense of humor that can only come from an author who endured every square inch of pain that it took in order to survive her childhood. …
Francis Ford Coppola's sequel pedals backwards and forwards from the events of the first Godfather. But while it ranges over great distances, from 1901 to 1958, it leaves a lot of gaps along the way — characters dropped from sight and mind, motives unhinted at. It is a movie that …
Francis Ford Coppola's sequel pedals backwards and forwards from the events of the first Godfather. But while it ranges over great distances, from 1901 to 1958, it leaves a lot of gaps along the way — characters dropped from sight and mind, motives unhinted at. It is a movie that …
A genius geneticist (Robert De Niro) approaches a bereaved couple (Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) with a limited-time-only offer to clone their deceased son: "This is extremely against the law." All goes well until the duplicate's eighth birthday, when he passes the age of his predecessor and becomes an overnight problem …