Robert Downey, crawling ever higher out of the underground, has gathered together a gaudy collection of fruits and nuts, dressed to the teeth, for a New York smark-aleck metaphysical absurdist Western. The awkward timing of the jokes and the performances (to call it "offbeat" would be a kindness) makes it …
Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis (Would-Be King of Rock-and-Roll) achieves the almost unbelievable: he overacts to an altitude above that of even Richard Gere as the Jerry Lee aficionado of Breathless. What these two movies have in common, besides Lewis's music, is director Jim McBride, which tells us something …
A historical recreation of the siege of Ansi Fortress and the epic eighty-eight day battle that Yang Man-chun and his Goguryeo troops fought against 500,000 invading Tang dynasty men to defend it.
Hidden from the outside world, the Great Bear Rainforest is one of the planet’s most exquisite and secluded wildernesses. Found on Canada’s rugged west coast, it is the largest temperate coastal rainforest in the world and is home to the indigenous First Nations people, who have provided stewardship of the …
Celebrated journalist Jep Gambardella (played with mournful comic pall by Tony Servillo) wrote a great novel — 40 years ago. Since then, he's been living a life of social ascendance and moral decline, and now, in the wake of his 65th birthday blowout, he suddenly finds himself surrounded by dead …
Affectionate and amiable portrait of a fading mentalist (a blissfully hammy John Malkovich) modelled on The Amazing Kreskin, whose fortunes have been on the downslide since Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show. Colin Hanks, as a law-school dropout hired to be the new road manager, is our innocent eyes and …
When it comes to pure visual comedy, there is no greater director than Buster Keaton. The guy literally broke his back to make audiences laugh. Without the aid of a shooting script, Keaton labored on film much the same way an illustrator would on a sketchpad. The resourceful Buster instinctively …
Jazz lover's orgy. The starting point is a group photograph of fifty-some jazzmen taken by Art Kane for Esquire at ten in the morning, or a little after, in front of a Harlem brownstone in 1958 (when filmmaker-to-be Robert Benton was the magazine's art director). From that hub emanate several …
An Oprah film (or anagrammatically, a Harpo Film) for Oprah's audience, with their insatiable appetite for uplift. The fact-based story of the debate team at little Wiley College, an all-black institution in segregationist Texas, and of their climactic showdown on the topic of Civil Disobedience against the national champs of …