Whatever slender charms this character (or its creator and incarnator, Paul Hogan) possessed the first time around have been nudged off the screen by his widening smugness. This is partly an effect of simply trying to keep him the same while time marches on around him. Rustic naiveté, for example, …
Entertaining lessons on Australian wildlife, from cable TV personality Steve Irwin ("It's so hot out here the flies are comin' right into my eyes for a drink"), are interrupted with an unentertaining fictional quest for a spy satellite's data recorder: swallowed by a croc, like the alarm clock in Peter …
Ecuadoran-born filmmaker Sebastián Cordero concocts an inflammatory fiction on inflammatory journalism, an unscrupulous exploration of professional ethics, a cynical exploitation of cynical exploitation. In it, a scripture-spouting Bible peddler (Damián Alcázar) accidentally kills a child who runs out in front of his car, the twin brother of a boy raped …
From a narrated prologue that relates how a Renaissance alchemist fled to Vera Cruz during the Spanish Inquisition, how he tinkered away on a secret invention, and how he met his fate in a cave-in in 1937(!), the action proceeds with cautious pace and meticulous circumstantiation into what amounts to …
Nicolas Cage is a caveman daddy trying to deal with Modern Youth. That is all.
Spike Lee knows enough camera tricks to keep you glued to the screen. Though not necessarily with pleasure. The sequence here that most nearly approaches outright pain, in fact crosses well over the threshold of it, is the one that employs an anamorphic lens to compress the players into funhouse-mirror …
Self-consciously feminist but rather mild and inoffensive biographical film about novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings -- inoffensive except maybe to fellow writers, who will have their own way of looking at her bouts of speed-typing when she is "inspired." The emphasis is on the group of people in the Florida backwater …
Based on Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. The title, reportedly, was changed in the belief that not enough of the moviegoing public is familiar with the story or its author. A more respectable reason would have been a desire to escape comparison with the book or the 1937 …
The reason Daniel (Samson Steine) and younger sister Sarah (Bianca Ghilardi-Hellsten) are seeking shelter in the home of Gerda (Anna Sofie Skarholt) and Otto’s (Bo Lindquist-Ellingsen) parents is dispensed with before the opening credits close: it wasn’t safe for Jews of any age to be living in occupied Norway in …
A New York romantic comedy that's truly romantic and truly comic -- and truly New Yorkian for that matter. Can a pretty, early-thirties, somewhat starry-eyed bookstore manager (and personal organizer of "the most prestigious reading series in New York City") find happiness with a second-generation pickle vendor on the Lower …
Sean Penn's second effort behind the cameras, after the narrowly released Indian Runner, is an effort indeed. It shows the writer-director at full stretch and on tiptoes, even though in artistic terms he is not yet a mature and well-developed adult. A heavy dependence on slow-motion for extra emotional and …
Unctuous liberalism and clumsy manipulation on the broad subject of illegal aliens: Mexican, Australian, Iranian, Korean, Nigerian, the whole rainbow, in multiple plotlines with a Crash-like incidence of coincidence. (The physical beauty of the female aliens helps, of course, to fuel liberality.) Embarrassment eclipses enlightenment. Harrison Ford, Cliff Curtis, Ray …
A group of international women peacemakers sets out on a risky journey across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, calling for an end to a 70-year war that has divided the Korean peninsula and its people. Comprised of Nobel Peace Laureates and renowned activists like Gloria Steinem and …
Amiable romantic comedy about "the all-important third date" -- a sort of D-Date -- and about the deceptions undertaken for the sake of a Good Impression. The borrowed car and apartment are such large deceptions as to border on mere distractions (the subsequently stolen car is beyond the border), and …
French children encore. The story -- a boy is left an orphan when his single parent dies, and his classmates close ranks behind him to keep it a secret -- generates more interest than most times. Not as much interest, however, as the same situation in the British Our Mother's …