A homeless mutt fills the void in the life of a motherless girl, and knits together the townsfolk of Naomi, Florida. The maker of The Center of the World and Slam Dance might not be the man whom you'd choose to entrust with the care of your children. Then again, …
Histrionic history lesson, with Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole showing their stuff, or stuffing their show, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and His Royal Majesty Henry II, respectively, once inseparable friends, driven apart by the demands of their posts. On the tongues of these actors, talkiness becomes talkier. …
The ripening of Miss Jane Austen, fictitiously re-imagined as a type of character in one of her own novels (minus the fairy-tale ending) and proportionately diminished as an artistic genius: a copyist more than a creator. The cast -- Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith, Lucy …
Forced, flat follow-up to Get Shorty, crudely directed by F. Gary Gray and coarsely photographed by Jeffrey L. Kimball, moving its base of operations from the film industry to the music business. John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance an encore to their number in Pulp Fiction. The Rock, stretching himself, …
And bored. The third installment (The 400 Blows, the first; Stolen Kisses, the second) in François Truffaut's history of Antoine Doinel, this chapter takes up the subject of conjugal life, and reduces the moviemaker to grinding out an episodic sitcom, to TV specifications. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade.
A Secret Admirer comes out boldly into the open: a withdrawn, eccentric, dilettante floral arranger (he delivers his creations in person: "I just like to see people's faces") whose heart goes out to a sad face -- a pretty face, too, rest assured -- seen through a second-story window in …
Billed as "a romantic thriller in the tradition of the master of suspense" (you know who, don't you?), this is one of the few such tradition-followers that gets up from its knees and stands eye to eye and/or goes toe to toe with The Master. Part of the reason for …
A tasty dish of British surrealism, and not bad as brain food -- either not a claim to be seriously made for many movies taking place in the aftermath of World War III, this particular version of that war having lasted very nearly two and a half minutes and left …
Uncle Skeeter’s yarn-spinning collaborations with button-cute niece and nephew — tales of the Dark Ages, the Old West, Ancient Greece, Outer Space — are translated magically into reality the following day. Adam Sandler, rarely funny anyway, shoots for the more attainable goal of schmaltzy. With Keri Russell, Russell Brand, Guy …
Cute name, even for an overhyped, presold, mega-budget moneymaking machine. (The return of Jerry Seinfeld! -- as leading voice, co-writer, co-producer, and principal drum beater.) Cute is much more than you can say, however, for the spongy, marshmallowy computer-animated honeybees or for the premise that permits them to converse in …
And also, as night follows day, Belchfest: an underground Olympics of drinking games held annually in Munich under the cover of Oktoberfest. From the Broken Lizard comedy troupe (Jay Chandrasekhar, director as well as trouper), this is lowest-common-denominator stuff — notwithstanding the esoteric allusions to Das Boot — and its …
Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, fresh from The Deep End, turn to a novel by Myla Goldberg. And on the evidence it's difficult to see how anyone could have thought there was a movie in it, even someone in the full flush of the spelling-bee documentary, Spellbound. Fictional spelling …
Family comedy with a bizarre plot hook about a dog-napping ring masterminded by an evil veterinarian (the benign Dean Jones behind coke-bottle lenses) for the purpose of testing lethal drugs, exploding bullets, and the like. (For whom? The CIA?) The hero is a big, slobbering Saint Bernard with superhuman, to …
Insipid but surprisingly well-worked-out comedy on the birds and the bees. The titular Saint Bernard gains some firsthand knowledge of the subject, with the result of four puppies. The two older children of the family (Nicholle Tom, Christopher Castile, very sweet) are starting to take an interest, too. The villain …