There’s a lot to forgive in writer-director Frédéric Tcheng’s documentary about the fashion designer who went from putting the pillbox hat on Jackie Kennedy to declaring that he wanted to dress all of America, starting with the framing device of a lady investigator trying to figure out “Whatever happened to …
Chilly tribute to "our boys" in Vietnam -- chilly because the message is made plain that if you weren't there yourself, you're nowhere, man. (This would seem to include, among others, the director of the movie, John Irvin, who's English.) Except for that standoffishness, it's an altogether modest and formulaic …
After a reign of three brief years, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is overthrown as the worst Hamlet in screen history. It was no problem to modernize the setting by moving the action to the Hotel Elsinore, New York headquarters of the multinational Denmark Corporation; but we are still stuck, even in …
An uphill battle, gamely fought. Franco Zeffirelli, using a (for him) subdued palette, is certainly a more cinematic director than, for a close-by example, Kenneth Branagh in Henry V. So much so that if the sound were to be switched off, the remaining picture would appear to be a truebred …
The Kenneth Branagh incarnation (blond like Olivier's). The prime selling point for this vulgarly overscaled remake of Shakespeare's revenge tragedy is that it presents for the first time on screen, at a length of four full hours, the uncondensed text, for which Branagh demonstrates his reverence by pouring buckets of …
Andrew Fleming’s low-budget indie about a lame-duck Drama teacher at West Mesa High in Tucson, forced to share classroom space first with the cafeteria workers and then with the girl volleyballers. The beady-eyed, seaweed-haired Steve Coogan is often funny as the affected artiste in a cruel and mocking world, and …
Wim Wenders's trickle-paced thriller is no doubt intended as a paean to Dashiell Hammett, though its orientation is much more toward the movies adapted from, or in the genre of, his work, than toward the work itself. The Forties-ish studio sets, the Venetian blinds, the shadows, and the gallery of …
Two ideas prevail. The first may be summed up in the term “anti-superhero,” or if you prefer it, “super-antihero.” The hero, that is to say, possesses the full complement of comic-book superpowers, yet he boozes round the clock, goes days without shaving, dresses like a slob if not a bum …
Handsome but spiritually empty transcription of the Evelyn Waugh novel about spiritual emptiness: you'd have only the faintest idea there had been anything funny, much less satirical, about the original novel. Kristin Scott Thomas and Rupert Graves, however, manage to convey much of the right qualities in the roles of …
Korea in the 1930s: a young woman (Tae Ri Kim) is hired to care for a mad (or is she?) Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee), who lives a life of seclusion on a sprawling countryside estate. “What does a crook know about love?” inquires a character in the latest from Chan-wook …
Doris Lessing, Ursula LeGuin, Kate Wilhelm, and a few others notwithstanding, science fiction has always been lopsidedly a man's game. But anybody with cause to feel persecuted and paranoid will have cause to elaborate those feelings in speculative fiction. And The Handmaid's Tale, by the feminist (and "straight" novelist) Margaret …
“Ring sense is an art,” intones legendary boxing trainer Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro) at the beginning of this strange and scattered Roberto Durán (Edgar Ramirez) biopic, “you’re either blessed with it from the day you’re born, or cursed without it until the day you die.” It’s as good a …
Curtis Hanson (Bedroom Window, Bad Influence), availing himself again of the Hitchcockian formula of ruffled complacency, develops the creepy situation of a happy family infiltrated by an undeclared enemy with an undisclosed (even to us) plan of action. To get into that situation, as into many another fruitful suspense situation, …