Inspirational pablum, "inspired," to begin with, "by a true story," that of Pierre Dulaine (played by that loverly Latin, Antonio Banderas), who volunteers to bring his courtly Old World manners and his ballroom dance steps into Detention Hall at a rough New York high school: Mad Hot Ballroom meets Blackboard …
Woody Allen's kidding of crime movies of all types -- the prison break type, the stick-em-up type, the semi-documentary type, the newsreel type. The marital comedy, with Janet Margolin, is more consistent, especially in earning laughs. Altogether, it's what Johnny Carson might describe as "wild."
A window fan blows the heat out of a sweltering Toronto kitchen as Michelle Williams kneels on the floor, her cheek pressed against the glowing oven door, her heart burning with desire. Happily married doesn't always mean happily ever after, and the tension between the two sets the tone for …
Film scenes tell of the forced cultural appropriation of a world-famous landscape. Monument Valley is one of the most recognizable landscapes in the world. Its iconographic use in American Westerns has had a lasting influence on stock photography, advertising, and tourism. The valley has been given mythical significance as an …
An ad exec and an escaped con do a kind of Prince and the Pauper, with complications never amusing, constantly annoying. Largest part of the credit for that goes to the foghorn finesse of James Belushi. (Guess which role he plays. Belushi's fans will be allowed two guesses.) With Charles …
Copycat serial-killer film. But let's be clear: it's not really the killer who's a copycat -- one of those diabolically clever, games-playing, wits-matching superfiends -- but rather the film itself, with its strained performances, transparent tricks, jack-in-the-box jolts, and palpable, sliceable, spreadable sense of dread. The big influence is Seven, …
Behind the colored smoke screen of a simulated toxic spill, a criminal mastermind evacuates Beverly Hills and attempts to empty the coffers of Rodeo Drive. One trouble: a resident pro quarterback (Ken Wahl) is running loose behind the line, dodging machine-gun bullets instead of linebackers, lobbing Molotov cocktails instead of …
Buzzed-up remake of the 1974 hijacked-subway thriller, a handy yardstick of early-21st-century style: photographic gimmicks (pixillation, slow-motion, blurs, zooms, whatnot), throwaway car crashes, outlandish one-man heroics from the deskbound train dispatcher, inflationism in theme and plot as well as in ransom demand. It took some smarts to retrieve from the …
The eminent German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler ("as big as Toscanini, maybe even bigger") undergoes a postwar grilling by a hammerheaded American major about his alleged affiliation with the Nazis: "I'm going to get that fuckin' bandleader!" A stagy statement of complex issues (adapted, after all, from a play by Ronald …
Ang Lee, evidently still banking on the critical goodwill since Brokeback Mountain, whips up some innocuous nostalgia around the milestone music festival of the summer of 1969, a fortieth-anniversary fictionalized addendum to Michael Wadleigh’s official Woodstock, complete with imitative split-screen effects. This docucomedy, so to call it, never gets near …
A material-minded young who wants to mint money falls for a young woman who believes money is the cause of all distress to life. Written and Directed by Karthik G Krish, starring Siddharth, Yogi Babu, Divyansha, Abimanyu Singh, Munishkanth, and RJ Vigneshkanth.
Hollywood remake of the first of Patricia Highsmith's five Ripley novels, originally made in France, under the title Purple Noon, forty years earlier. (The remake is done in period: Chet Baker and Charlie Parker are the coolest, man.) Clearly, writer-director Anthony Minghella does not owe his inspiration to a desire …
Charmingly sincere fairy tale of forgiveness, revolving around a kingdom known for its soup, the dark days that befall it, and its truthful, fearless, chivalrous deliverer, an undersized mouse with oversized ears and ego. A magnificent cast if you could see them, if, that is, they weren’t hidden behind stiff …
Natalie Portman directs and stars in her treatment of Amos Oz's memoir about being a child in the nascent nation of Israel.