Let’s start with the biggest and happiest surprise about Disney’s followup to what was, before the Lion King remake, the biggest animated film ever: Olaf the Snowman is considerably funnier and more useful to the story this time ‘round. His ridiculous recounting of the first film’s events to some folks …
Let’s start with the biggest and happiest surprise about Disney’s followup to what was, before the Lion King remake, the biggest animated film ever: Olaf the Snowman is considerably funnier and more useful to the story this time ‘round. His ridiculous recounting of the first film’s events to some folks …
Stoical prole sob story has some fresh ground to go over — the smuggling of illegal aliens through the slushy snow of the Mohawk Indian reservation on the Canadian border — and some stark scenery to go with it. Writer and director Courtney Hunt, whose plotting and pacing are sloggingly …
Because your little girl simply will not stop singing "Let it Go" and "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" you are seized with the faint and entirely unreasonable hope that taking her to see this sing-along version will somehow sate her appetite. She will join with the movie for …
You know where this train is going before it leaves the station: the film opens with cell-phone footage of BART officers subduing a young black man who does not appear to require subduing. Then you hear a shot. The young black man was 22-year-old Oscar Grant, and Fruitvale Station is …
Big-screen treatment of the 1963-67 television series of the same name. The original was something special: existentialism for the masses; Swanson Frozen Kafka; an installment-plan Odyssey (or: The Longest Distance Between Two Points). And David Janssen, an actor of the narrowest range, had in Dr. Richard Kimble, innocent man on …
John Ford's sanctification of a Mexican whisky priest, from the Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory. It is Ford's highest-striving movie, which for him will have to mean his most experimentally Expressionistic. (It is also, as he stubbornly maintained in the face of public and critical rejection, his …
A priest (Fonda) in Latin America is pursued by a ruthless police lieutenant carrying out the dictates of an oppressive, anti-clerical government. There's another fugitive as well, an American killer on the run, and the paths of the two hunted men cross with fateful consequences. Directed By John Fordand Emilio …
Faced with a traumatic injury that renders you permanently disabled, how would you reinvent yourself? In 2014, Trevor Kennison's life was forever altered by a broken back - for worse and for better, in equal measures. The documentary about his life features Kennison and Barry Corbet.
Steven Soderbergh offers no reassurance, after Ocean's Eleven (and Traffic and Erin Brockovich), that he has not been ruined beyond redemption. Outwardly, this day-in-the-lives-of-motley-Hollywoodites would appear to be an attempt to recapture that old Independent Spirit, even if the filmmaker hedges his bet by enlisting Julia (Roberts) and Brad (Pitt) …
A rather barren opening stretch of forty-five minutes or so in Marine boot camp, photographed in a shade of algae-green, trimmed with mildew-white, to ensure that the viewer's eyeballs have no pleasanter a time of it than the enlistees' bodies. After that, there is a marked improvement, all the way …
Half a dozen individuals from the legions of out-of-work Brits come up with a novel short-term solution: a Chippendale's-style strip show, despite a lack of Chippendale's-style bodies. It's a solution that focusses usefully on the issue of Manhood: its loss, its restoration, its definition. Some of the high spirits get …
In 12th century China, during the Song Dynasty, a dramatic tale is set against a brewing rebellion by the Jin people against the Imperial Court. Two hours before a crucial diplomatic meeting between the Song Prime Minister Qin Hui and a high level Jin delegation, the Jin Ambassador is murdered. …