Ry Cooder, the eclectic American guitarist, singer, composer, and musicologist, rounds up some old lions (and a lioness) of Cuban popular music, for a series of live concerts, recording sessions, on-camera interviews, and ultimately a debut at Carnegie Hall. (Their sightseeing sidetrips on that occasion are a delight.) Directed by …
Disney's second computer-animated feature, following Toy Story, and somewhat embarrassingly released two months after Antz, from arch-rival DreamWorks. There can be no question of outright copycattery. The movies were too close to neck-and-neck for that. But the mere coincidence of two computer-animated features set in an ant colony and centered …
A novelty act: an all-juvenile cast, dolled up with double-breasted suits and slicked-down hair, re-enacts the underworld passions played out on the Warner Brothers lot in the Thirties by Cagney, Robinson, McHugh, Blondell, et al. The kids break into periodic song-and-dance routines, and the guns are loaded with lethal whipped …
It is not altogether easy to do such an uninteresting version of such an invincible story as the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot affair. One slight handicap here is the cast (Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero), none of whom can sing, but all of whom engage in some intense competition to exhibit the …
The Pixar people, director John Lasseter in particular, envision a world of cars without people (Mommy, where do cars come from?), but of course anthropomorphized cars, such that the windshields are eyes and the hoods, grilles, and front bumpers form noses and mouths. The vision focusses chiefly on a hot-shot …
“It’s a kids’ movie!” Well, no, not quite, not when the theme is middle-aged obsolescence and finding meaning beyond personal achievement. Not when the unhappy fate that horrifies star racecar Lightning McQueen is forced retirement and transformation into a brand. And definitely not when more effort shows in the photorealistic …
A let's-put-on-a-show musical, set in Golden Age Hollywood and among a cartoon cast of primarily animals. Tolerably lively and clever, especially in view of the energy-conserving animation, but the nostalgia element (throwaway caricatures of Laurel and Hardy, Bette Davis, Mae West, etc., as in an old Looney Tune) will overshoot …
Intrepid auteur Werner Herzog goes with a tiny crew into the Chauvet cave in France, otherwise visited only by scientists for a brief time each year. His camera and imagination feast on the sculpturally elaborate caverns, the bone-covered floors, the amazingly vivid Cro-Magnon paintings of animals. Typically, the narrating Herzog …
Mongolian movie from one of the two directors of The Story of the Weeping Camel, Byambasuren Davaa. This one tells the story of a little girl and a stray dog, not a yellow dog, but white with a black face and a black spot on his back, hence his christening …
High-grade Hitchcock knockoff by Stanley Donen, with Cary Grant on hand to supply pedigree. Audrey Hepburn, composer Henry Mancini, cinematographer Charles Lang, designer Jean D'Eaubonne, and the city of Paris all add their share of glamour. With Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy.
E.B. White's barnyard children's story, a friendship fable about the promise of a spider to save a spring pig from the smokehouse. Sweet sentiment soured by the cacophonous Cultural Diversity of the animal voices (British sheep, Southern cows, African-American geese, New York City rat, Julia Roberts spider, and so on) …
The sky is falling, in Disney's computer-animated retelling of the tale, turns out to be a metaphor for an alien invasion, and the title character becomes a synonym of civic-minded vigilance. More basically, he and his styrofoamy chums -- the ugly duck, the fat pig, the fish out of water, …