Brian De Palma, as ever, exhibits abundant mechanical skills and equally abundant delight in their application. It would be fruitless to wonder what kind of career he could have had if he possessed even half a brain. Here he constructs, from a script of his own, a self-conscious film noir …
A crime of passion and its irreversible aftereffects intrude upon the equanimity of French bourgeois lives, rather paradisiacally pictured by Claude Chabrol. His would-be critical observations of the milieu are rather deflatingly squeezed between his encouragement of Stephane Audran's slinky, glamorpuss posturings and his own slick emulations of his favorite …
A fictionalized slice of Endel Nelis’ life finds a gruff but easily thawed Kirill Käro starring as the Estonian fencer — Épée dueling, not cyclone — who has spent much of 1952 masquerading as a gym teacher in order to escape Russia’s secret police. With most of the sporting equipment …
There’s only one fence in director and star Denzel Washington’s presentation of August Wilson’s play about an outsized personality and the world he finds himself squeezed into: the pine-plank job that trash man, father, and former Negro Leagues baseball star Troy Maxson builds around his backyard over the course of …
Author Munro Leaf’s beloved children’s book is a pacifist primer intended to advise kids on how not to follow in the kamikaze footsteps of jingoistic bovines eager to lay down their lives on the field of honor. Disney’s 1938 short will forever remain the definitive adaptation, but that wasn’t enough …
It is the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino a year earlier. Ferrari …
It is the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino a year earlier. Ferrari …
Writer-director John Hughes offers another piece of candy to teenagers, in hopes that they'll like him, maybe even (by now) appoint him an honorary lifetime member. A day of hooky is obviously a wide-open opportunity to prove the superior cunning, free-spiritedness, aliveness, and so forth, of youth over adults. And …
Writer-director John Hughes offers another piece of candy to teenagers, in hopes that they'll like him, maybe even (by now) appoint him an honorary lifetime member. A day of hooky is obviously a wide-open opportunity to prove the superior cunning, free-spiritedness, aliveness, and so forth, of youth over adults. And …
A record, plus split-screen reminiscences, of a chartered train trip across Canada in the summer of 1970, carrying Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Band, Buddy Guy, Ian and Sylvia, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and others, from a concert date in Toronto to successive dates in Winnipeg and Calgary. The …
Something about Las Vegas seems to impel filmmakers into montages, and Richard Brooks has been less resistant than most. Worse, the image, even when held on screen for more than a second, is grainy and muddy, and one can only surmise that Brooks has somehow dragged down the fine cinematographer, …
A men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus romantic comedy, a substantial subject and amply amusing. It tells you a lot about the film, though, that the gist of it may be summed up in the title of a pop-psych best seller. Our Martian man, a middle-school math teacher, is also (note the year: 2003) a …
So-so court-martial melodrama in the vein of The Caine Mutiny, juiced up with several megatons of Star Power: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, and, a couple of comparative firecrackers, Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon. It's intermittently entertaining, though never dramatically involving, to watch these people throwing everything they've got …
Orson Welles's tediously prankish essay on the topic of illusion and reality, incorporating both staged and spontaneous material, as well as some second-hand stuff, all shuffled together in a hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye style. Some of it is moderately intriguing (the sessions with art forger Elmyr de Hory, shot not by Welles but …