The ancient, noble quest of the archetypal hero was resonated by famous mythologist Joseph Campbell. This film says little about Campbell but quotes his ideas (“find your bliss,” etc.) in a buzzy spray of testimonials, celebrities (Tony Hawk, Mick Fleetwood, Laird Hamilton, Deepak Chopra), film clips (Star Wars, The Wizard …
Xiao Lu Xue continues the story begun in 2013's Finding Mr. Right. In Mandarin.
Computer-animated fish story from the Pixar people (Andrew Stanton, director), by way of Disney, about a neurotically fretful clown fish by the name of Marlin ("Clown fish are no funnier than any other fish"), whose only surviving offspring, a normally inquisitive fingerling named Nemo, gets captured by a scuba diver …
Academic exercise, adapted from an unrenowned theater piece entitled The Man Who Was Peter Pan, that purports to show how the playwright J.M. Barrie sculpted the glazed statue of Peter Pan from the soft clay of his real-life relationship with a widow and her four boys. (Albeit a platonic relationship, …
Director Brent Baum's documentary covers an expedition to find the final resting place of Noah's Ark. Narrated by Gary Sinise.
The titular Oscar, one of the only survivors of a terrifying massacre during middle years of the nearly four-decade Guatemalan civil war, appears at the opening and the closing of Ryan Suffern’s documentary, and provides the harrowing tale with some heart. But the head, hands, guts and legs belong to …
Not knowing the box he bid on contained the negatives of an uncharted street photographer whose pictures would later become his own private money-spinner, geeky Chicago real estate agent John Maloof hit artistic and financial paydirt after essentially purchasing a stranger’s life at auction. Vivian Maier, an eccentric serial nanny …
Upon catching hubby in the arms of her best friend, snooty ‘Lady’ Sandra (Imelda Staunton) hops a train to bunk with the commoner sister (Celia Imrie) she hasn’t seen in years. A sideways glance at the poster was all it took before I began to wave away the stink of …
Forty-nine years after Sidney Lumet's first courthouse drama, as well as first film of any type, Twelve Angry Men (which, inasmuch as it takes place in the jury room, can't quite be called a courtroom drama), the now eighty-one-year-old director returns to the genre. He had gone back to it …
A wishful title for a slapstick comedy, and an unfulfilled one. It is neither fine nor a mess -- smooth, polished, sharply photographed (by Harry Stradling), but somehow remote, cold, antiquated. What started out to be a remake of the Laurel and Hardy short, The Music Box (you can still …
A straight-up Boys’ Own adventure yarn, set sincerely and squarely in early ’50s New England but gussied up with plenty of 21st-century StormWave CGI. A monster winter storm causes not one but two oil tankers to split in half off the coast, and so many people are busy attending to …
The tempestuous directorial debut of scriptwriter James (The Gambler) Toback, about a confused young man who vacillates between the career choices and value systems represented by his Italian-Catholic Mafioso father and his Jewish classical-pianist mother. It is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. Harvey Keitel, with his portable cassette-deck …