The monkey's no trouble; is on the contrary as fun as your average barrelful. This capuchin, trained as a pickpocket and (excuse the expression) cat burglar, runs away from his nasty master (Harvey Keitel, with a kerchief on his head and a come-and-go gypsy accent) and attaches himself to a …
Bookended by Benjamin Britten’s stirring “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” this is the most subtle, supple, deftly stylized fantasy from Wes Anderson. It happens on an island where scouting sets the tone of life. Brainy, dreamy kids (Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward) flee camp and home to share a wee …
Domestic crime drama about the well-deserved death of a wife-battering, coke-sniffing boor (a one-note performance, and a loud note at that, by Bruce Willis). Suspense is minimal, since the story is told in flashbacks from a police interrogation room; and the "shocking" ending raises more questions than it answers. But …
Juvenile adventure yarn about a treasure hunt for the legendary booty of the Knights Templar, handed down to their natural successors, the Masons, and squirreled away by the American Founding Fathers, with clues to its whereabouts written in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence. The Jerry …
National disgrace: another overtaxed premise with an eye to a Franchise. ("This doesn't involve another treasure hunt, does it?") The honorable name of Gates has been implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and rather than finding this historically intriguing, the present-day Gateses find it personally insulting. Exoneration will lie …
The night in question witnesses the arrest of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette near the French border, and the movie closes in on that event in the illustrious company of Restif de la Bretonne, Casanova, Thomas Paine, and others, who are trailing along in the king's tracks. Overlong and overtalky, …
Jane Campion (Sweetie, An Angel at My Table) continues to pursue an interest in the tricky cinematic subject of inward states: namely those of a mute-by-choice Victorian Scotswoman and the white-man-gone-native (Maori facial tattoos, Maori bedmates) with whom she has an extramarital affair in far-off New Zealand. At some point …
You can make out the skeleton of a typical youth comedy, centered around an inveterate skirt-chaser thrown for a loop by a droll redhead who says yes on the first afternoon in the front seat of the Camaro and then says no thereafter. This is firstly a James Toback film, …
Yet another conversion from French to English, francs to dollars. Insofar as Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita (now she's la femme Nina: after Nina Simone, her favorite chanteuse) was already immersed in the Hollywood mind-set, little revision was needed. And little improvement is noted (quite the opposite at the end). …
A remake of Manhunter, 1986, for the sole purpose of instating the "real" Hannibal Lecter -- Anthony Hopkins -- in the role. (It would have been simpler, if it would have been technologically possible, to cut-and-paste him digitally into the pre-existing film, obliterating Brian Cox.) And never mind that the …
The directorial (also auctorial) debut of Quentin Tarantino, a past actor with a small part here. (Initial impression of him: a bit of a showoff.) In its essentials, it's a conventional heist movie, and there is not a lot more to it than essentials: an ad hoc gang of jewel …
Cinema’s answer to a picture-postcard rack, the franchise operates solely on the premise that audiences will return so long as the cast is appealing, the location enticing, and the romantic subplots not too demanding. I liked it better when they called it The Love Boat. For once, the multiple plot …
It makes a nice story, that Susanna Styron has transferred to the screen a short story by her father William, but it doesn't make such a nice movie — a groaningly stretched-out anecdote about a ninety-nine-year-old former slave who returns to the farm in Old Virginny to die. Careful Depression-period …
Computer-written comedy about a Reno lounge singer who witnesses a mob murder and, while waiting for a court date, hides out in a Carmelite convent, whips the cacophonous choir into shape (giving a Christian twist to that girl-rock classic, "I Will Follow Him," as Kenneth Anger already did in Scorpio …
Droll stories, or droll vignettes, or droll sketches, of the walking wounded in the vicinity of a Brooklyn cigar store. Occasionally, at least once anyhow, something poignant occurs: a grieving widower, paging through the storekeeper's "conceptual" photo album of identically framed snapshots taken outside his shop at the same time …