Garbo, showing off her famous thick ankles, and looking generally dumpy and discouraged as a waterfront tramp, appears in her historic, first talking role ("Gif me a viskey and don' be stingy," and so on). The movie itself, one of seven Garbo vehicles directed by Clarence Brown, is hopelessly stagy, …
Notwithstanding the incidental Tchaikovsky, a predominantly British-accented rendition of the Tolstoy story, with an incongruously French-accented title character. Well-dressed but starchy and leaden. Streamlined to the point of effacement. With Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean, Alfred Molina, Mia Kirshner, James Fox, Fiona Shaw; written and directed by Bernard Rose.
By-the-numbers military training exercise: a sensitive riveter, not content just to build ships, joins the Naval Academy on a promise to his late mother. There's a withholding father, a hard-ass drill instructor, a roly-poly lagging roommate, a foxy female officer, and a boxing tournament for proving manhood. James Franco might …
Not especially imaginative documentary: the standard salad of interviews, prosaic narration (Kenneth Branagh), and photographic records. Yet we realize from the age of the interviewees how near we are to the end of the living memory of these events, and the story gets told in considerable detail, and the only …
Stodgy BBC type treatment of the stormy marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, with the unflatteringly photographed players dressed to look like pincushions and talking themselves, and their audience, to death. Genevieve Bujold, Richard Burton; directed by Charles Jarrott.
Going-through-the-motions filming of the Broadway hit. On past evidence, no one would imagine that director John Huston has any special aptitude for musicals. Or on present evidence either. His first-ever musical, after three dozen movies and more than twice that many years, is big, slow, and ugly. Albert Finney, doing …
Woody Allen's approximately autobiographical movie tells of the short-lived romance between a New York Jewish intellectual (Allen himself, accoutered in a thrift-shop wardrobe) and a kooky Midwestern WASP (Diane Keaton). It can usefully be thought of as a movie tailored to the critics. It is Allen's most "personal" movie (no …
Altman-esque ensemble piece co-written and co-directed by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, who, in addition, play a newly reunited Hollywood couple, a fading star (Leigh looking more like her father, Vic Morrow, with each passing year) and a sexually ambivalent British novelist and novice film director. Real-life mates Kevin …
Walter Hill's thirteenth feature is also — oh, unhappy day! — his first sequel. A sequel, moreover, to the most negligible and not coincidentally most lucrative of his previous movies. The verbal and sometimes manual patty-cake of Nick Nolte's slobby cop and Eddie Murphy's spiffy con — Rumbles and Screechy …
Moscow, 1983. Wheelchair-bound Guy Bennett (modelled on homosexual British defector Guy Burgess) settles in front of a tape recorder to tell his story to a reporter from the West. What can have caused him to sell out his country? This question is a heavy load to place on a portrait …
The second filmmaking venture of noted still photographer Larry Clark (the first was Kids), or in other words a second license not to hold the camera still. As before, the intended drift of the thing is to convince the comfortable, complacent moviegoer that he had no idea that reality could …
The sequel to Stakeout goes the way of the Lethal Weapon series: into escalating silliness. (Even the title, copied from Another 48 Hrs., is not a novel way for a sequel to go.) Enlisting stand-up comedian Rosie O'Donnell and her audible gasp makes the intentions perfectly clear. The most actual …
Understated, even a bit muffled or muzzled, wartime drama about Italian POWs in Scotland, working in the fields alongside the natives and living next door to a comely and, by local lights, overhospitable farm wife. There are plenty of things to like here, such as the troll-faced wallflower's unaccompanied song …
Woody Allen's followup to September: more of the same, but a bit better. It's true that Allen still isn't on screen in it. And his dialogue continues to be overly declarative and explanatory, so that characters' utterances sound more like psychological profiles and biographical backgrounds from the author's Preliminary Notes: …
The reclusive author (Jeff Daniels) of the best-selling Me and God, cornering “ten percent of the God market,” slowly yet suddenly comes out of his shell at the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication. Writer and director John Hindman, owing a good deal to As Good As It Gets (although …