Three grown-up, go-getter sisters encumbered with a Problem Parent: three top-line actresses (Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow, Diane Keaton) encouraged to give actressy performances by their actress-director (Keaton again). Ryan receives the most encouragement, and commits the worst offenses. The script is by the Ephron sisters, Delia and Nora, so it …
Sledgehammer comedy about four buddies (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha) who go to Vegas for a bachelor party and wake up the morning after with no memory of the night before, a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and the mystery of a missing …
Director Todd Phillips remakes his hit comedy The Hangover — a story about bachelor-party boys who wake up with an absent friend and no memory of the night before — only this time it’s bigger, louder, dumber, and completely joyless. (Original touch: a cute little monkey who smokes, deals drugs, …
For those who exited The Hangover Part II feeling their time and money well spent, this is the hair of the dog that bit you. The rest of humanity might consider a rabies vaccination before entering. This time, franchise creator Todd Phillips does away with the customary Mike Tyson cameo, …
Pairing up Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner may make a kind of sense to a dating-service computer, but mere humans are apt to find it a strain on the eardrums, if not on credulity. Plugging this pair into a Hitchcockian thriller formula provides the credulity-strain. Richard Widmark, Robert Prosky, Kathleen …
Hannah and Her Sisters runs an hour and forty-six minutes, rather long for a Woody Allen film, in fact the first of his films whose running time has stretched all the way to three figures. One might hope going into it that this would be a reflection of the larger …
A surprise departure from Margarethe von Trotta, Germany’s answer to Ingmar Bergman. This softball biopic, filmed in the manner of a stiff '60s melodrama, chronicles a crucial point in the life of the famed German-Jewish philosopher. It also pays homage to her mentor, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and his cinematic skipper, …
Singing sensation Hannah Montana, “the most popular teenager in the world,” has a secret, an ordinary life as a normal high-schooler under her real name of Miley Stewart (played by Miley Cyrus, alias Hannah Montana), daughter of a down-home Tennessean, Robby Ray Stewart (Billy Ray Cyrus). Only a blond wig …
Costa-Gavras continues to live up to his responsibilities as he sees them, in taking on the Middle East impasse. The plotline about an Israeli attorney (Jill Clayburgh, liberated like never before) becoming entwined emotionally with her Palestinian client is neither as far-fetched nor as offensive as it might sound -- …
Sequel to The Silence of the Lambs: long, slow, eventually revolting; less a fright film than an anguish film; somber, overinflated, operatic (it stresses the "grand" in Grand Guignol); no doubt a disappointment to people who actually wanted a sequel; of little interest to people who didn't. It could have …
Soft on cannibalism. But after all, Hannibal Lecter has made a lot of money for Hollywood, a powerful argument for clemency. Mostly boring and senseless, the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs (and Hannibal and Red Dragon) busies itself with mitigating circumstances. Surely any reasonable man can understand why …
Euphemism for Hao Lo prison, and bugs, lizards, rats, cats o' nine tails, stocks, manacles, electroshock, and minutes that pass like hours. The physical frailty and emotional quaveriness of Michael Moriarty, as an eight-and-a-half-year occupant of the place, are quite affecting; but the absence of any personality in him or …
There is a big difference between making this sort of WWII romance in 1943 and making it in 1979, much bigger than simply the difference (big in itself) between, say, Tyrone Power and Joan Fontaine on the one hand, and Harrison Ford and Lesley-Anne Down on the other. It is …