Characteristic piece of Wim Wenders deep-think, or deep-sulk anyway, about the decline of Western civilization, the ascent of Big Brother, the crass commercialism of the American cinema, and similar morsels. To get down to brass tacks: it tells of a successful Hollywood producer (Bill Pullman), specializing in violent movies and …
David Ayer, the screenwriter behind Training Day and Dark Blue, sets out to make his Life and Times of a Police Officer in South Central, complete with opening manifesto in voiceover. ("If you cut me, I bleed.") But he winds up with Cops for the younger generation. (Cops Jr.? Copz?) …
Not so treacly sports film from Disney, on the life of the Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie (who plays himself in adulthood). A docudrama with better documentary values than dramatic: prettily photographed and mundanely observant, but thin in incident, spare in dialogue, stiff in performance. The opening (and reprised) musical …
The harrowing tale of that aborted and rerouted attempt to cross Antarctica on foot, just after the outbreak of the First World War. It's quite a tale, all right, and documentarist George Butler puts it into a tidy little package of tinted footage and still photos taken by the party's …
The opening sequence, of what a newspaper headline will describe as a "Freak Balloon Accident," disrupting an idyllic picnic in the English countryside, is a true grabber. The protagonist, who loses his grip both literally and then figuratively, will be tortured over his role in the mishap, despite the reassurances …
When an environmental crisis sees London submerged by flood waters, a young family is torn apart in the chaos. As a woman (Jodie Comer) and her newborn try and find their way home, the profound novelty of motherhood is brought into sharp focus in this intimate and poetic portrayal of …
The situation, straight from the I.B. Singer novel, is instantaneously interesting: that of Holocaust survivors in New York after the war, specifically that of one who is leading a double life, with a subliterate new wife and a cultured mistress on the side, and then suddenly a triple life when …
The Battle of Stalingrad, reduced ridiculously to a personal "duel" between superstar snipers, a Russian peasant and a German aristocrat. ("It's the essence of the class struggle," opines the editor of a propaganda newsletter.) The telescopic shootouts are meticulously diagrammed, and there are several spectacular shots of aerial attacks, and …
In the late 21st Century an earthling and a Drac, on opposite sides of an outer-space dogfight, are downed together on an uninhabited planet, rather like Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on an uninhabited island during World War II in Hell in the Pacific. These two learn to co-operate sooner, …
Going-through-the-motions paranoia thriller that goes through them like greased lightning. Plenty of high-tech whoosh and whirl, in other words, but no emotional impact. The governmental Goliaths, who want to institute a Surveillance Society (the inclusion of Gabriel Byrne and Loren Dean in the cast helps to call to mind Wim …
In Clint Eastwood's third outing as Dirty Harry Callahan, the biggest malcontent on the San Francisco police force, he is shackled with a rookie female partner at the same time that he is attempting to ferret out the People's Revolutionary Strike Force, a terrorist group that has no apparent ideology …
Pleasant enough, modest, hummock-sized tall tale about a pair of English cartographers stopping in a Welsh village during the Great War, measuring the local pride and joy -- the first mountain in Wales -- as sixteen feet shy of an official mountain, and getting detained there while the villagers pile …