What's up, celebrity doc? This one about Rolling Stones founding member, Bill Wyman.
Whatever promise Oren Moverman’s (The Messenger) co-screenwriting credit held is quickly dashed in another undistinguished five-characters-in-a-haunted-house spooktravaganza. Erin Richards and Rory Fleck-Byrne play Renfield(s) to Jared Harris’ mad genius, a college professor bent on ridding the world of psychosocial behavior, one possessed foster child in a white hospital gown with …
Terence Davies’s slow and sumptuous A Quiet Passion turns the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (played mostly and hauntedly by Cynthia Nixon) into an unenthusiastic but unshakable martyr for her sex. It’s not that she doesn’t want the piety and domesticity expected of women in her place and time; it’s …
For reasons never made clear, a roving posse of sightless and sharp-eared but otherwise cookie-cutter-quality Hollywood aliens zeros in on a pleasant young couple and their three children, looking to emulsify anything that makes a sound. A note on an eraser board establishes the existence of but three of the …
The sound of sequels.
The sound of sequels.
The sound of sequels.
Plenty of scraps for the starving Western fan, from the table of Simon Wincer, the Australian director who had provided a near feast of such scraps (amid much bloatedness and waste) in the eight-hour TV miniseries, Lonesome Dove. The presence of a post-Civil-War American marksman in the Australian Outback feels …
A middle-brow mulling of the issues of free expression and censorship, with the Marquis de Sade as the bone of contention. (Present-day application warmly invited.) The movie does not try to deny literature's potential damage to weak minds -- at least to the extent that a slobbering resident of the …
Brazilian historical pageant, of dubious export value: too distant already to bear up under Carlos Diegues's "distancing" devices, and too propagandistic to have much intellectual appeal. It tells of a slave revolt on a 17th-century sugar plantation, sparked by the folk hero, Ganga Zumba, who was also the subject of …
Slice of Latino life in Echo Park, centered around a pregnant virgin (Emily Rios) a few months shy of her fifteenth birthday, "the day she becomes a woman." (Her boyfriend's suggested name for the baby: "If he's a boy, we can call him Jesús.") The filmmakers, Richard Glatzer and Wash …
When five lovely young girls who hate studying hire part-time tutor Futaro, he guides not only their education but also their hearts. Time spent has brought them all closer, with feelings growing within the girls and Futaro. As they finish their third year of high school and their last school …
Robert Altman looks into the future through a frosted window. What he sees is a snowbound civilization, bands of well-fed dogs devouring human carcasses, and the last survivors dressing in Renaissance costumes and entertaining themselves with an unfathomable game called Quintet, which may be played either with a game board …
Interesting idea: to re-enact the drug addiction, mental breakdown, and recovery of actor Jia Hongsheng with the actor himself playing the role. (Together with his real father, mother, others.) The shopping excursion of the peasant father to purchase a Beatles tape is amusing (the old man has never heard of …
Robert Redford's tardy exposé of the TV game-show scandals of the late Fifties has the common drawbacks of the docudrama. The drama, as such, is already well documented (foreknown, foregone), and, to the extent that it remains tied to the facts of the case, is perforce not terribly dramatic (formful, …