The definitive documentary on Ronnie James Dio transcends the standard rock documentary. Dio rises from ’50s doo-wop crooner to his early rock days in Elf and Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, to replacing Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, and finally cementing his rockstar status with his own band, DIO. The first documentary …
Hard on the heels of a recent series of documentaries on noted fashionistas Halston, Diana Vreeland, Anna Wintour, and Valentino comes the least ambitious of the bunch. More time is devoted to the lives of seamstresses than the celebrated fabric fabricator. What little we do learn about Christian Dior’s schizophrenic …
A brave dramatic premise: as the Allies approach Nazi-occupied Paris, the German military governor of the city prepares to follow his orders and blow up the City of Lights. But before he does, the Swedish consul-general pays him a surprise visit to plead for mercy. You probably know the ultimate …
A man tries to return an Indian daughter to her home country.
Penn Jillette (who also scripted) and Missi Pyle star in a horror comedy from Adam Rifkin (Detroit Rock City, The Last Movie Star.
A teenage girl, bound for college and the Peace Corps in the summer of '63, falls in with the "entertainment staff" at a Catskill resort, and it changes her life forever: goodbye Namibia, hello mambo. The transformation, presented as an Ugly Duckling makeover with a debouchment in Swan Lake, amounts …
Brought to Batista's Cuba by her well-heeled father in late '58, a blond blue-eyed Jane Austen reader (Romola Garai) gets a bit of a Lawrentian thing going with a swarthy young pool boy (Diego Luna, a true cutie). Patrick Swayze, from the original Dirty Dancing, trying desperately to look younger …
Starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson.
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 …
Clint Eastwood and his favorite director, Don Siegel, took over this project from Frank Sinatra and Irvin Kershner, and the result is yet another halfway sharp, halfway shoddy Siegel cop movie, with vast stretches of barely motivated and barely connected dashing around, punching and gouging, shooting and dying. The grudge …
The beginning-to-end car chase is elevated somewhat above the ordinary (hair-raising stunts, ear-splitting sound effects) by the polished, if overly souped-up, direction of John Hough, and by the unsympathetic, unwholesome characterizations of Peter Fonda as a nervous, cackling, narcissistic speed maniac and Susan George (the one and only) as a …
The bicontinental British filmmaker Stephen Frears returns to the milieu of his Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and My Beautiful Laundrette -- the London melting pot, but this time in the grimmer mood of a Thirties-style social drama (the Warners studio, most typically), with a rough, raw, skinned-knuckle image and …
Steve Martin and Michael Caine take over the respective roles of Marlon Brando and David Niven in the 1964 flop, Bedtime Story: two con men preying on wealthy women on the Riviera. And they play them extremely broadly, to reassure the audience it's all in fun -- lethal in a …