An eleven-year-old black girl (the appealing Keke Palmer) in the South L.A. ghetto braves the taunts of "freak" and "brainiac" to enter the Scripps National Spelling Bee and, on her first try, go clear through to the televised finals in Washington, D.C., where it all comes down to "logorrhea" and …
Eight re-creations of the Japanese director's unconscious dreams. All are so limpid, so economical, so tidy -- so much so as to cast doubts on the authenticity of their origins or the accuracy of their re-creations -- that the viewer is able to feel like Freud's brightest disciple. Death would …
A heretofore unknown director, Sterling Van Wagenen, shows off a heart the size of a honeydew and a cinematic intelligence nearer a grape. In a dollhouse re-creation of Second World War-period New York, a traumatized French girl, methodically tearing up newspapers into tiny scraps, is coaxed back from the brink …
Unadventurous wilderness adventure about an uprooted Chicago Cubs fan and his younger sister who, escorted by a baby polar bear dubbed "Cubby," search the Alaskan mountains for their father, teetering helplessly on a precipice in his downed plane. (Yes, just to round out the "cub" motif, a Piper Cub.) Everything …
Hollywood's ongoing war against great children's books scores a late victory in Miguel Arteta's version of Judith Viorst's slim '70s classic. The technique for expanding a picture book to feature length film (granted, it's only 81 minutes) isn't great: after having the day in question, Alexander (Ed Oxenbould) wishes that …
Michael Caine as a bargain-basement Lothario with a heavy accent on cockney crassness, and with a cocksure understanding of where your sympathies and your scorn are supposed to fall. Like most movie ne'er-do-wells, particularly those who garner Oscar nominations, he melts into self-pitying sobs somewhere near the end. Directed by …
A newly widowed housewife, advancing toward middle age, hits the road, with her vocal twelve-year-old son in tow, in search of a future of some kind, hoping to make a go of it as the Alice Faye-style singer she dreamed of becoming in her childhood. (The passion for goldie-oldie songs …
Tim Burton’s adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic gives him license, free rein, greased rails, to stage a congenial freak show in a hermetic netherworld: a 3-D moving-picture book. The customary merger of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, has the innovation of a marriageable …
Take away the stupidly expensive (and sometimes just stupid, or overdone, or overlong) visual effects, take away the sad necessity of hitching your story to a familiar wagon (oh, look, the first installment in this particular reboot of an established property made over a billion dollars!), take away the Disneyfied …
To feel affection for the grade-Z science-fiction films of the Fifties, especially as their descendants get ever more deluxe, is perfectly natural and no cause for shame. (A Not-Guilty Pleasure.) To set out in the 21st Century to make a grade-Z science-fiction film of the Fifties, purportedly shelved and now …
A lyrical, decades-spanning exploration across a woman's life in Mississippi, the feature debut from award-winning poet, photographer, and filmmaker Raven Jackson is a haunting and richly layered portrait, an ode to the generations of people and places that shape us. Starring Charleen McClure, Moses Ingram, Reginald Helms Jr., Zainab Jah, …
A shamefaced copycatting of Disney's FANTASIA. To put some distance between his model and himself, Bruno Bozzetto, the Italian animator, elects to flip-flop the values of the Disney movie -- the naivism of the animation and the solemnity about classical music. Bozzetto's cartoon sequences are both gamy and preachy, and …
Comic Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner hash over roughly the same idea of their previous The Man with Two Brains. The beautiful body with the ugly personality remains constant, except that the body in this case is Victoria Tennant's instead of Kathleen Turner's. But the beautiful disembodied brain has …
Another inspiring true story from Affirm Films, this one starring John Corbett as salesman-turned-pastor and his mission to save a group of refugees from Southeast Asia.
The movie version of the Carl Bernstein-Bob Woodward book betokens the promotion of mild-mannered Clark Kent to the hero's role, protector of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. This post-Watergate permutation of the newspaper genre clings to plenty of starry-eyed ideas (Gordon Willis's lighting, for instance, sets up an overstated …