Better-slob-than-snob comedy about a blue-collar Joe who squires home his divorced girlfriend's blue-blooded son for Thanksgiving. The final destination is predictable, as is every step of the way. But then, John Hughes (only screenwriter, not director) was doing the navigating. With Ed O'Neill, Ethan Randall, JoBeth Williams; directed by Peter …
Screenwriter Craig Lucas, of Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss, turns director as well, bringing to the screen his own stage play, a behind-the-scenes peek into the studios and boudoirs of Hollywood: the negotiations over a labor-of-love screenplay about the death from AIDS of the writer's lover (his dream …
How can Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood’s documentary meditation on stand-up comedians, which features a murderer’s row of talent — Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Gary Shandling, Jerry Lewis, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, Kevin Hart, et. al. — be almost entirely unfunny, and more than a little dull? It starts with …
And dying pretty -- first in a posh palace on Nob Hill, then in a two-story treasure of Victoriana on a Mendocino cliff, and in the company of a private nurse with a ton of hair, miles of legs, and an acre of lip (Julia Roberts). And dying, if need …
Donald Sutherland sags into his Roman toga when his soldier nephew (Channing Tatum) goes almost solo from Britannia into dark, primeval, 2nd-century Scotland to retrieve (great Caesar’s ghost!) the gold eagle of his dead father’s decimated legion. Though a limited actor, Tatum has the brawny force of meat on a …
Political paranoia thriller so utterly preposterous that it has the opposite effect and reassures us we have nothing to worry about. (And so pell-mell in presentation that we can barely follow it.) Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, as ordinary citizens under the eye, thumb, and puppet-strings of Big Brother, are …
A Raoul Walsh-ian war film turned topsy-turvy so that the Nazis take over the Errol Flynn-Ronald Reagan roles. The story has to do with a typically humble Nazi scheme to kidnap Winston Churchill, and the hopelessness of the task adds some firm evidence of action director John Sturges's preoccupation with …
Documentarian Otto Bell’s titular huntress — a 13-year-old Kazakh named Aisholpan who hails from a family boasting generations of champion (male) eagle hunters — is impossible not to like and/or root for. She’s cheerful, natural, diligent, sweet, and full of dreams about following in her father’s footsteps. So Dad consults …
Action drama written and directed by Karthik Gattamneni, starring Ravi Teja, Kavya Thapar, Anupama Parameswaran, Navdeep, and Srinivas Avasarala.
Pamela Anderson stars as Shelly, a glamorous showgirl who must plan for her future when her show abruptly closes after a 30-year run. Directed by Gia Coppola.
In the psychological thriller directed by Lorcan Finnegan, a man returns to the idyllic beach of his childhood to surf with his son. But his desire to hit the waves is thwarted by a group of locals whose mantra is “don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Humiliated and angry, the …
Clearly and weirdly blind to the limitless potential afforded by an animated feature set during the dawn of man, the usually imaginative Nick Park (Chicken Run, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) squanders 90 minutes sketching a wearisome soccer match between the Stone Age and the Bronze World. Add to this …
The second of a "Trilogy of the Elements" by Indian-born, Canadian-based filmmaker Deepa Mehta. It has little in common with Fire, the first, beyond its Indian setting, its general interest in social changes there, and its alluring leading lady, Nandita Das. The backdrop this time is historical, at the very …
The circle of life, all around the globe, arctic to tropic, desert to ocean, illustrated everywhere in luscious calendar art, crystalline in digital projection. The Disney nature documentary allows some survival-of-the-fittest brutality, but none of the gore that would accompany it. “Yes,” concludes narrator James Earl Jones, “it’s full of …
One in a rash of fires lit on screen for the environmental movement. Documentarist Robert Stone, stepping back for the long view, gathers his fuel from the origins of the movement, the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the mobilization that led up to the first Earth Day …