Imitation Jules Verne adventure yarn, spun from the Disney animation factory, about a pre-WWI expedition in search of the legendary sunken city. Sketchily drawn (in a deliberately retro style) and swiftly paced, but slowed down eventually by moral-mystical-political-anthropological grandiosity. With the voices of Michael J. Fox, James Garner, Cree Summer, …
It must first be acknowledged that this self-proclaimed nuclear Reefer Madness is every bit as much a propaganda film as the 1940s and 50s relics it so confidently holds up to ridicule; and second be acknowledged that the assembled educational films, commercials, and newsreels, presented without commentary and without sufficient …
British, bookish period piece, from an Ian McEwan novel, about a young girl's misreading of the amorous activities of her elders, and its tragic consequences. (A mole on the right cheek links the three different actresses who play the role, Saoirse Ronan in the Thirties, Romola Garai in wartime, and …
A lethargic on-the-lam thriller revolving around a blond nineteen-year-old Parisienne who, smitten by the dark lean chiselled Arabic good looks of a secretive stranger, stands by him after he takes part in a fatal bank robbery. Or rather, runs alongside him. To Spain, to Morocco, to Greece. Set in 1975 …
This excursion into the supernatural has a subject, but no story to speak of. The subject, reincarnation, harbors about as much dramatic potential as, say, evolution; and so, to inject some horror-story thrills into it, Frank de Felitta, author of book and screenplay, has postulated a freak case, a faulty …
Pick your Uncle Vanya: (a) Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street; (b) Michael Blakemore's Country Life; and now (c) Anthony Hopkins's August — all within the space of a couple of years. (An authentic Russian locale is not an option. ) This present version, transplanted to Hopkins's native Wales, has …
Mystical magical musical about the orphaned spawn of an unmarried rock-and-roller and classical cellist, all three reunited through music, under a full moon in Central Park, in the boy's twelfth year. Too gooey to be true. And the synthesis of motley forms of music produces ear-strain on top of credulity-strain. …
An animal picture for highbrows. Robert Bresson's episodic chronicle of the martyrization of a humble donkey is a sort of Christian existentialist version of Will James's horse story, Smoky, only not so credible in its plotting. Among devout Bressonites, this is sometimes said to be one of his supreme achievements, …
A noir-ish whirlpool around an epileptic taxidermist (Ricardo Darín), dragging down the withdrawn daydreamer into an unmanageable crime of opportunity. The second film of the Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky, as much a character study as a caper film, is more measured and mature than his flashy first, Nine Queens, but …
Louis Malle's autobiographical war film, about the harboring of three incognito Jewish students in an exclusive Catholic boys' school, makes a nice companion to his Lacombe, Lucien -- nice and quiet and well-mannered, where the earlier one was more aggressive and apt to ruffle feathers. It's something of a corrective …
Contorted spoof of the early Bond films, or of previous spoofs of them, which of course were spoofs to begin with. Already the satirical aim can be seen to be shaky, and the persona of the superspy as a stereotyped Sixties "swinger" (it says so right on his license plate) …
Mike Myers's one-joke comedy, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, is stretched into a sequel. And not only has the richest source of material already been pretty well tapped out -- the anachronism of a swinging Bondian superspy in the Nineties -- it is now also pretty well abandoned, with …
Nearly three million square miles of tripe. A Ferber-esque epic of a “delicate English rose” who takes over her late husband’s cattle ranch in rugged northern Australia on the eve of World War II, a Cimarron Down Under, with a sprinkle of Aboriginal magic, and a thick coat of high-gloss …
Perhaps Israel Horovitz, the author author, identified himself too closely with his protagonist, and thus assumed that anything falling within his experience would be sure to engage our sympathy. However that may be, he has not given any shape to the mass of troubles burdening a good-hearted Broadway playwright: troubles …