Based on the classic Michael Noonan novel, "December Boys" is the story of four orphan teenagers growing up behind the closed doors of a Catholic convent in outback Australia during the 1960s. As the boys watch younger kids get adopted by loving families, they begin to realize that as they …
"Dedication," is a modern love story in which Henry Roth, a misanthropic, emotionally complex author of a hit children's book series, is forced to team with a beautiful illustrator after his best friend and creative collaborator passes away. Henry is messed up. A New York children's book author who tells …
Grueling and gruesome British-made horror film about six women friends (plenty for sacrifice), out for adventure, who enter an uncharted Appalachian cavern ("If there's no risk, what's the point?") and encounter a subterranean tribe of omnivores. Director Neil Marshall, straight-faced, businesslike, unpretentious, had a real movie going -- a movie …
Under house arrest for summer vacation (punchy opening scenes to explain how he got there), a troubled high-schooler begins to observe his surroundings through a pair of binoculars, and convinces himself that his neighbor is a serial killer and that the new girl next door is a hottie. Teenage suburban …
Julian Schnabel relates another true-life tale from the wide world of art, this one a little more liberated from convention than his Basquiat or his Before Night Falls (though it immediately and continually brings to mind Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside), the tale of Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor at Elle …
A Christmas baby, orphaned in the delivery room and provisionally named Christine ("Sounds like Christmas"), leads a London midwife (Naomi Watts) on a quest for the infant's nearest relative, and straight into the dark heart of the Russian mafia: a deceptively avuncular restaurateur (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his loose-cannon son (Vincent Cassel), …
Cate Blanchett, or a bloodless marmoreal likeness of her, resumes her role from the nine-years-earlier Elizabeth, under the same director, Shekhar Kapur, for a collection of the Virgin Queen's greatest hits: Mary, Queen of Scots; Sir Walter Raleigh; and, in a madly cross-cutting climax, the Spanish Armada, dispatched by the …
December-December romance between a withdrawn new widower and his blithe and spirited neighbor, still nursing a lifelong dream to visit the Trevi Fountain and re-enact the Dolce Vita scene involving Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni. (She, an Argentine, lives in Madrid, a short enough hop to Rome.) Pretty mushy but …
In an overlong prologue, a generic fairy-tale princess, rendered in a pastiche of old-time Disney animation, is dispatched by a generic wicked witch to "a place where there are no happily-ever-afters," namely modern-day Manhattan in live action, whither she's soon followed by her betrothed prince, a CG chipmunk, and a …
Morbid remembrance of the blip-like rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick, tricked out with pseudodocumentary gimmicks by the sometime documentarist George Hickenlooper. Andy Warhol, well mimicked by Guy Pearce, is not hard to make into a compelling figure. But Sedgwick -- elevator heiress, socialite, art groupie, temporary "it" girl, drug …
What Carlos Saura did for the art of flamenco and tango in films called Flamenco and Tango, he now sets out to do for that soulful Portuguese folk song, dating back to the early 19th Century, the fado. A spacious and spare studio, translucent partitions, process screens, backdrops, mirrors, colored …
Multi-player mating game on the playing field of Portland, Ore. Essentially soap opera with philosophical aspirations and a tendency to talk them at us. Most of it is mildly interesting, in a low-suds sort of way, but the relentless effort to transform it into a Big Statement ("God is either …
A square baseball movie, "based on a true story," about a small-town Iowa high school housing nineteen state baseball championships in its trophy case ("We grow ballplayers here like corn"), now facing consolidation into a larger school district, and entering its last year of independence under a wet-behind-the-ears rookie coach …
Inane canine comedy about a screen star called Rexxx -- no, not a bestial porn star, but the big-budget action star of Jurassic Bark and The Fast and the Furriest -- who discovers his true vocation as a firefighting mascot. The human emotions and human villainy are a touch heavy, …