New-fashioned swashbuckler: more an amusement-park attraction than a tale of adventure; nearer Vegas's Treasure Island than Stevenson's. Lots of spectacular stunts, explosions, chases, and lots of slow-motion to assist your appreciation of them; not lots of charm, though, or spirit. Director Renny Harlin sees to it that his wife, Geena …
Post-apocalypse science fiction, or post-MTV anyway, with the world overrun by fugitives from a Billy Idol video. Brutal action, and plenty of it; frugal but functional ruins and rubble; laughably laconic dialogue; a reverberantly basso profundo villain, no less laughable; and a terrier-tense hero, who has to be bailed out …
Cypress Hill celebrates the highest of high honors of its storied career with Black Sunday Live at the Royal Albert Hall, a three-day theatrical event and live album both immortalizing the hip-hop icons’ collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra.
It would be hard to top Fred Schepisi's Roxanne as the #1 film adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s nasally enhanced romance, but the latest from Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist) comes close. Time and again Peter Dinklage has proven to be more than just another Billy Barty, a character actor accepting …
Jean-Paul Rappeneau's rendition of the Edmond Rostand play is a perfectly acceptable version of the piece for either someone who has never seen a production of it before or else someone who can't get enough of it. But the interest of the thing is infinitely more literary than cinematic. The …
Hey, what if art imitated life? Or rather, what if we made some art in which a famous real-life work of art — Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac — was little more than a funhouse reflection of real life, crafted practically on the fly by a frustrated poet-dramatist who (we're …
“Edgy” indie comedy by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass (“mumblecore” movers and shakers, makers of Baghead among others), the premise of which would be just as easy to imagine as a mainstream Will Ferrell vehicle: an oafish divorced lonelyheart (“I’m like Shrek”) thinks he may have found a new …
When you're tired of Jackie Chan, you're tired of dudes in wheel-suits speeding down the highway like a human scooter. This time, he's looking to recover 12 stolen heads. But there will be no recovering YOUR BLOWN MIND.
D-minus. The Pee-Wee pucksters, having overcome the odds to win the local championship, are ready to take on the world and overcome steeper odds, at the Junior Goodwill Games in L.A. The villain: Iceland. Iceland? Yes, Iceland. (A bold move, inviting protests from the Icelander Anti-Defamation League and virtually writing …
An expatriate Irish playwright hashes things over with the ghost of his father -- literally, and in stiltedly literary language: "You spent your life sitting on brambles, and wouldn't move for fear someone would take your seat," etc. He also gets to have a generation-gap spat with "himself" -- though …
Spike Lee’s biggest accomplishment was assembling a cast of seasoned Hollywood veterans to bring to life his saga of four African-American survivors of the Vietnam War (and son) who reunite in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), ostensibly to track down the remains of their squadron leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). …
Nishan, born into a middle-class family, dreams of getting rich fast. While his father urges him to pursue an honest living, Nishan chooses a riskier route-joining a gang in India led by a smuggler (played by Shahiduzzaman Selim). His job: drug trafficking. After going to jail for murder and other …
A daring robber, striving for survival and establishing his own territory amid conflicts with powerful adversaries, battling to become a "king without a kingdom." Directed by Bobby Kolli, starring Nandamuri Balakrishna, Bobby Deol, Pragya Jaiswal, Shraddha Srinath, and Chandhini Chowdary.
A carefree bachelor's life is disrupted when he is thrust into the role of caregiver for a spirited young girl.