It’s refreshing to see a comedy about crotchety nursing-home residents who don’t mumble with British or American accents. Unfortunately, that’s the only characteristic that distinguishes writer-director Raúl Marchand Sánchez’s Broche de Oro from its English-speaking counterparts. Think Cocoon, only this time with nothing you've dreamed of and everything you expect. …
Judging by the trailer, Hong Kong is just as capable of producing a dreadful comedy as America.
Without a proverbial pot to piss in, Depression-era audiences flocked to cinemas to hear (and see) corines clad in papier-mâché coinage lift their spirits to the strains of “We’re in the Money.” After the success of 42nd Street, Warners followed their formulaic mold to the letter: bridge a handful of …
The producer-director team of Merchant-Ivory (not to forget writer Jhabvala) return, seventeen years after The Bostonians and twenty-two after The Europeans, to Henry James. A maturer James, and a maturer Merchant-Ivory, too. Inasmuch as it's James, it is guaranteed to have a rich, loamy, fertile situation, a variation on the …
Funky fairy tale. Eddie Murphy is the pure-in-heart, sharp-in-tongue Finder of Lost Children in seamy Los Angeles, although in what official capacity we are not to know. Nor are we to know how or why he has also been tabbed as The Chosen One, whose destiny it is to rescue …
Unstirring epic fantasy, set in a parallel universe where people's souls walk beside them in the form of talking animals, called "daemons." In addition, there's a whole glossary of made-up proper nouns, an obligatory oppressive, thought-policing Ruling Power, and a young girl singled out by destiny to be the Savior, …
Written and directed by Emanuele Crialese, this is a film that really and truly does its subject — the historical immigrant journey — from beginning to end, bottom to top, forwards and backwards, rustic Sicily to Ellis Island. It does it with taste, with telling detail, and with artistic vision, …
Story of a man who, in the words of the narrator, "transformed himself into an angel." The man, a White Devil at the outset, is an FBI agent who successfully frames a Chinatown laundryman during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, and who seeks forgiveness a decade later in …
A modern-day Fagan (Eric Tsang as “Papa”) posts bail for an orphaned group of five lifelong friends whose style and loyalty he admires, hoping to mold the kids into an adult team of elite mercenaries. At its heart, this unofficial entry into Hong Kong’s Young and Dangerous series functions best …
Robert Clouse's splashily colored comic strip jumps from Hong Kong to Hollywood and back, on a life-and-death treasure hunt for a placid Oriental statue which, in its acupuncture instructions, holds the secret to eternal youth. Joe Don Baker dishes out some good old-fashioned punches in the midst of kung-fu country; …
The title refers to a painting, but the subtitle —The Story of a Stolen Life — has to do with protagonist Theodore Decker, a child (and later in the film, a young man) whose development is arrested by the death of his mother in an explosion. And by his father’s …
When a stock market crash causes the sudden collapse of a multi-billion-dollar company, an ICAC investigator (Andy Lau) uncovers a criminal conspiracy involving the company’s founder, Ching Yat-yin (Tony Leung), and becomes entangled in a long-running investigation.