Effective sentimental piece, and anti-advertisement for aquatic theme parks, about the bond between a troublesome foster child (despite super-cool foster parents) and a captive killer whale. The dialogue is often disarmingly simple-minded ("You saved my life," the towhead says to his 7000-pound pal, after spitting up water and regaining consciousness …
Just when you thought the emotional turmoil had been smoothed out, the foster child finds out that his real mother is dead and that he has a half-brother coming to live with him ("It's called kinship care"). Then, flaunting the ideal of the nuclear family, Willy the Whale pays a …
Willy's about to become a father, if, that is, he and his mate can evade the whaling boat on their collective tail. His human buddy (Jason James Richter) is now seventeen, and gainfully employed as a research assistant on a whale-tagging project. But there's a new, younger buddy as well, …
Writer-director Jason Lew’s debut feature is very much a religious picture, dealing as it does with a wrongfully imprisoned man’s conversion to Islam and the subsequent test of that conversion. But while the religious stuff is clearly set forth and left in plain sight, it’s easy to overlook, given the …
Jean Renoir's backstage musical provides plenty of opportunities for short naps while following the fortunes of discontented shopgirls and licentious showbizzers in a harshly colorful, turn-of-the-century Paris. Finally the energy is gathered for a big finale, as Renoir switches back and forth, didactically and thrillingly, between Jean Gabin musing in …
William Friedkin's best, a gritty policier shot on location in New York, follows a career cop (Gene Hackman) on the trail of heroin smugglers.
My appreciation of the films of Wes Anderson began curdling halfway through The Royal Tenenbaums. His star on the rise, Anderson began buying into his own press and from it emerged a style that, even with the best intentions, tended to engulf, rather than inform. What followed was children’s wallpaper …
Gordon is a hopeless romantic whose proposal plans are put in jeopardy when his girlfriend gets swept away to Canada by a job offer from her ex. Determined to keep their love alive, he leaves Brooklyn, N.Y., for her hometown, only to find himself out of his depth while trying …
Fluffy stuff about a multiphobic American, most particularly Francophobic American, pursuing her errant fiancé to Paris and the Riviera, and falling in step with a French -- Franch -- Fr-r-rahnsh -- thief. A charming, mustachioed one, but of course. You can see immediately where it is headed, and Lawrence Kasdan …
John Fowles's Victorian-age romance has been interwoven with a modern-day romance between the two lead actors starring in a screen adaptation of that book -- not between the two real-life actors, Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, but between two fictional actors who are played by the aforementioned two real ones. …
A no-laughs comedy (unless man-punching-woman and woman-headbutting-man can crack you up) in the Bertrand Blier mode. Which means it strives more for provocation than for humor and achieves more contrivance than either: trying out the various and self-negating possibilities in a ménage à trois composed of a philandering husband, a …