Espionage epic, reasonably described by one blurbist as "The Godfather of CIA movies," but only if you are satisfied to retain all the pretentiousness of The Godfather, right down to the oppressive underillumination, and do without any of the enlivening pyrotechnics. (Despite those subtractions, the movie still comes to within …
A dream of overnight success on the New York art scene, as well as of a longer road to written-in-the-stars true love, realized in the dreamiest cinematic style: the dizziest, the dopiest. There are a number of recognizable points of connection with the Dickens novel on which the movie is …
The second feature film, following The Front by fifteen years, to treat of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. (That's not counting indirect, veiled, metaphorical treatments like Elia Kazan's apologia on the virtues of becoming an informer, On the Waterfront.) Room remains for many other treatments, though we cannot have …
“Ring sense is an art,” intones legendary boxing trainer Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro) at the beginning of this strange and scattered Roberto Durán (Edgar Ramirez) biopic, “you’re either blessed with it from the day you’re born, or cursed without it until the day you die.” It’s as good a …
An ambitious, even overambitious, game of cops and robbers, fitted by rolling pin into the time-frame of Monday Night Football, a shade under three hours. Writer-director Michael Mann wants to have his opposing game players two opposite ways — as existential archetypes and as multi-dimensional humans — and the transitions …
To speed his daughter's recovery from her mother's sudden death, a Manhattan psychotherapist whisks her upstate to a Gothic monstrosity, big enough to house a family of twenty, on the edge of a deep dark woods, where she seems to sprout into a Bad Seed. But is her imaginary new …
“God, I wish your expressions weren’t so transparent.” It’s a line our internet fashion house founder (Anne Hathaway) uses, though it’s not clear whether it’s in reference to the 70-year-old newbie assigned to be her intern (Robert De Niro) or the seasoned actor who plays him. The solid premise – …
During his fight against the Nazis, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) forced a pair of enemy soldiers to dig a hole that, in the few seconds it took to fire off a few rounds, became their eternal resting place. Little did the soldier know at the time, but this “follow …
At first, and for the better part of its two and a half hours, this is apt to seem an oddly unadventurous undertaking for Quentin Tarantino, a gabby adaptation of a novel by his revered Elmore Leonard (source of notoriously mediocre movies), draggy, only fitfully funny, lifelessly staged, largely static. …
Stage play in close-up (Stephen Metcalfe's Strange Snow -- and whoever retitled it gets an "F" in spelling), about a reunion of two Vietnam vets and the interest one of them takes in the other one's sister. (It's a different-worlds romance, joining the worlds of the grease monkey and the …
Writer-director David O. Russell serves notice that there have always been multi-generational stories of strong women who figure out how to make their way in a so-called man’s world — on television soap operas. He even helpfully opens this (based-on-a-true) story of one woman’s (Jennifer Lawrence) struggle to become the …
At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting …
At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting …
Nice idea; nice execution. A self-styled but totally untested comic named Rupert Pupkin and a female groupie named Masha kidnap a Johnny Carson-ish late-night talk-show host, each for their own private ends, Pupkin to extract a fifteen-minute guest spot on The Jerry Langford Show and the groupie to fulfill her …
The old, old -- fifty-six-year-old, to be exact -- Alec Guinness vehicle retailored to the expansive personality and physique of Queen Latifah. As a mousy cookware clerk at a department store in New Orleans, given three weeks to live and determined to blow her bank account on a dream vacation …