Peacocky costume piece with an insufferably self-satisfied Fabrice Luchini in the titular role of the 18th-century French wit, playwright, magistrate, periodic political prisoner, duellist, spy, gun-runner, great lover, voice of liberty, and all-around fascinating fellow. The script comes with an intriguing pedigree, traceable to an unproduced and unpublished play by …
Béatrice Romand, an engaging teenager in Eric Rohmer's series of Six Moral Tales (in Claire's Knee, to be exact), has grown up to be an engaging young woman in his ensuing series: Comedies and Proverbs. Which is not to say that the character she plays isn't a typical Rohmer fathead, …
Morally neutered sex comedy, by Bertrand Blier, about a fourteen-year-old girl setting her cap for her thirty-year-old stepfather, a failed jazz pianist. A goodish amount of time is spent trying to make you feel sympathy for the two, to put you in a receptive frame of mind (since one of …
Inverted and cut-rate Ninotchka, built around the talents, most particularly the hoarse adenoidal honk, of Fran Drescher, as a New Yawk cosmetologist recruited by mistake to teach the children of the neo-Stalinist tyrant of mythical Slovetzia. She makes her lines her own: "Could I possibly [gesturing to the bearskin on …
Pretty, for sure, in Stuart Dryburgh's glossy photography. A parentless Vietnamese peasant, shunned in his picturesque village as "bui doi" ("less than dust," the term reserved for children of American fathers), tracks down his mother in the big city, where she works as a housemaid for an old crab who …
Frugal and fact-based Canadian period production concerning the involvement of Walt Whitman as guru figure in the reform of an insane asylum in London, Ontario, and as feather-ruffler of the local dodos. It is quick to tut-tut over the obstinacy with which men of the 19th Century hold to the …
A supposed "showcase" for a large ensemble of New Generation actors, not all of them as new as they need to be for their ten-year high-school reunion (in the dead of the Massachusetts winter!). Scott Rosenberg's glib, stilted, writerly dialogue -- to do with the ongoing growing pains at the …
Laundered biography of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and madman, John Forbes Nash, Jr. It's his madness, of course, and not his math, that makes him a viable screen subject, and director Ron Howard nurtures it with care. (And with more taste and restraint than are his custom.) But between the …
The melting pot of modern London, with special accommodation for emigrés of the Balkans (origin of the writer and director, Jasmin Dizdar). One of the plotlines -- wherein a young heroin addict curls up on a cargo crate at the airport and wakes up in Bosnia -- outpulls the rest, …
Above-averagely attractive thing, more like. Good-looking thing, for sure, with some of the deepest, wettest, Pop Artiest reds and blues seen on screen since the 1960s work of Jean-Luc Godard (or of Jerry Lewis). The first film of Hettie Macdonald, who had directed the original Jonathan Harvey play on the …
A traditional fairytale kingdom of enchanted forest, decaying castle, and magic, poetic occurrence is laid out by Jean Cocteau, perfect in every detail: the crowd-pleasing cinematic sleights-of-hand, the resplendent, soft-toned imagery of France's "quality cinema," the fragile, fine-china beauty of Josette Day, and the humiliatingly hairy makeup of Jean Marais.
The Disney people, perhaps because their five-year recycling program causes them to lag behind the rising social consciousness and thus opens them to attack from assorted interest groups (Indians re Peter Pan, feminists re Cinderella), seem now, with their thirtieth feature-length cartoon, to spend as much time on Proper Attitudes …
The Disney people, perhaps because their five-year recycling program causes them to lag behind the rising social consciousness and thus opens them to attack from assorted interest groups (Indians re Peter Pan, feminists re Cinderella), seem now, with their thirtieth feature-length cartoon, to spend as much time on Proper Attitudes …
Ana Geislerova is the Czech beauty, who’s in trouble with an incarcerated car-thief husband and, after she moves in with her mother, a creepy stepfather. A possible solution is to meet one of the car thief’s victims, a distinguished older gentleman with a vineyard in Tuscany and the nicest guy …
Relationship comedy, high-strung, low-stooping. As a meddlesome mother determined to marry off her third daughter, Diane Keaton is required to be both irritating and irresistible. She half succeeds. First half of the equation only. Although not without a certain slouching charm, Mandy Moore ("Actually, I love to sing") comes in …