Disenfranchised earthlings invade a distant planet in clayey 3-D animation. Stirring music and excellent space-travel effects at the start, and a well-imagined other world, and an anti-war, anti-imperialist (i.e., anti-Earth) campaign that offers no easy solution, only a naive one. With the voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson, Justin …
Gillo Pontecorvo's re-staging of the Algerian struggle for independence tries for a journalistic effect — an historical epic in a newsreel idiom. But this effect really owes less to the grainy black-and-white image than to the selectivity of information, the slanting of same, and the editorializing. The cast — well-chosen …
Against-the-grain dog story about an intelligent, even intellectual bull terrier (who narrates in the manner of It's a Dog's Life: resemblances stop there) with a latent fascistic personality. He hankers after a master like himself -- no love, no fear -- and finally finds one in the person of a …
Present-day parable of Paradise Found and Paradise Lost: more precisely, a legendary island Shangri-La somewhere near Thailand (from the air it looks like Never-Never Land in Disney's Peter Pan, meaning, among other things, that it looks painted instead of photographed), home to a Hippie Commune cum Club Med, as well …
Americanized, and accordingly broadened and coarsened, version of Agnes Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't: an improbable friendship founded on one meeting in girlhood and carried on for three decades, and across a huge cultural gap, primarily through letters and in total oblivion of those "Reach-out-and-touch-someone" telephone ads. As a …
French documentary for a highly select audience, film aficionados with an affection for the one-time New Waver, Agnes Varda, now a gnomish octogenarian: "I'm playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative." She travels the entire length of Memory Lane (a block or two of which …
A feature-length blowup of a TV sketch character well known to fanciers of British imports on PBS. To nonfanciers just now meeting him, Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) might be remindful at times, in his childlikeness and mischievousness and even in his exact facial expressions when peering over or around his …
Wilderness adventure about the bond between an orphaned cub and a male Kodiak stalked by two hunters. The wild card in this hand is the peephole into the little cub's dream world: nothing succeeds in humanizing the animal (or animalizing the filmmakers) as much as the couple of glimpses into …
Lots of action, of various types, on a barren island in the Barents Sea (no bears, even, on this Bear Island), used during World War II as a U-boat base and now the center of some mysterious neo-Nazi activity. Not as clever at concealing the villains' identities as some of …
Synthetic folktale, drawn to ancient specifications: a king's son deprived of his birthright and his identity in infancy, reared in exile, coming back in adulthood to carry out his prophesied revenge. The main point of originality is the bit of witchery whereby the embryonic hero is transferred from human womb …
The Dark Ages -- and very dark indeed, not just in illumination but in literal deed: eating without utensils, nose-blowing without hanky, a newborn babe abandoned in the snow, the hemorrhaging mother ravished in the castle dungeon, a little incest, a little patricide, a little Christian immolation. This sort of …
Odd and unsatisfying selection of old material and new, nosing around the subject of the Beat phenomenon, but not pinning it down either as to period or locale, to the Beat people's situation then or now, in one place or another. Because the method is evocation rather than explication, it …
Youth musical, as essentially innocent and wholesome as an old Garland-Rooney vehicle, about a clique of kids from the Bronx whose talents run high and in many directions (break dancer, rapper, graffiti spray-painter). There's a naturalistic texture to the environment, but the action goes by at such an unrelenting blur …
Jacques Audiard's dishevelled remake of Fingers improves on James Toback's all-thumbs rendition. Not hard to do. The unglittering star, Romain Duris, is ugly-handsome in the Belmondo mold, his teeth barely fitting into his mouth; and he manages to make the protagonist — a man torn between a life of petty …
A uranium treasure hunt in very clique-y company (Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones), this cult item is often pulled down from the shelves as an early example of conscious Camping (not to be confused with unconscious Camp), although another Bogart-Huston collaboration, The Maltese Falcon, a …