Moderately eccentric children's film about a sixth-grader who is training herself to be a writer by jotting down her eagle-eyed observations in a notebook marked "PRIVATE." It's still interested in teaching worthwhile lessons ("The truth is important, but so are your friends"), but first it's interested in squirming around in …
Photojournalists in the early days of the civil strife in Yugoslavia. A Pulitzer winner from Newsweek, trapped inside a collapsed building, is presumed dead, but his wife, who afterwards receives an inaudible long-distance call and tentatively recognizes him (from behind) in news footage on CNN, believes he's still alive. So …
When Harry met Meghan.
Pa and "Kid"; a laid-off construction worker and a laid-back surfer; "an asshole and a son of a bitch"; Paul Newman and Robby Benson (well, he has blue eyes, too). Nice and cute, but not, as the short story the offspring writes about his experiences is described, "profoundly moving and …
Director and co-writer William Dear joins the ranks of Steven Spielberg's Trucklers and Lackeys, Inc. Can a Seattle suburban family adopt Bigfoot as a pet -- or better, as a member of the family? Will they be willing to cut meat out of their diet and take down the hunting …
The odyssey of a senior citizen and his pet cat, evicted from a condemned New York apartment house and drifting calmly and philosophically through a lucky succession of piquant events and characters, becomes a sort of Easy Rider or Five Easy Pieces for the geriatric crowd. As handled by Paul …
If only for its proximity in time, this naturally calls to mind Gran Torino. But the vigilante-revenge plot brings it closer to a geriatric Death Wish, with a widowed pensioner in a London slum arming himself against Clockwork Orange ultra-violent youth and drawing on his training in the Royal Marines …
Or for short, Harry Chamber Pot. In the second screen adaptation of a J.K. Rowling children's book, our now pubescent hero fumbles his way to a giant, squirming, slithering basilisk (syn., cockatrice) via a concealed orifice in the girls' lavatory, the haunt of a ghost called Moaning Myrtle: "Harry, if …
Proof No. 7 that J.K. Rowling’s vision is excitingly served by a savvy film team that both embellishes and concentrates her mythology. Almost Dickensian in richness, the epic darkens as the young heroes wander through a gloomy but elegant wilderness like little Lears, hounded by Lord Voldemort’s furies. Hogwarts and …
The epic chronicle ends, after eight films that filled a decade. The over $7 billion in movie lucre it will finally receive is far less important than the many millions of fans who have loved the storytelling abundance, the beautiful splurges of craft, the three growing heroes (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma …
The fourth installment in J.K. Rowling's series of children's books yields a two-and-a-half-hour movie which, for all its furious activity, gets virtually nowhere. It gets, more specifically, through the "legendary" Triwizard Tournament, only to arrive at the dampening admonition, "Dark and difficult times lie ahead." Potterites, under the freedom-of-religion pact, …
Part VI — Pot VI — comes close to a complete cheat. The once child actors, children no more, are developing faster than the story, and indeed the foretold war with the Dark Lord tends here to be crowded out by assorted amorous hankerings among Hogwarts classmates. (Those broomsticks for …
Pot V, if you're counting. War with the Dark Lord, as you might recall from the end of Pot IV, approaches; and after another two-and-a-quarter hours of stretching and padding, it still approaches. At the rate Daniel Radcliffe is aging, Harry looks on course to be the World's Oldest Grad …
Or for short, Pot III. It has a new director — Alfonso Cuarón, of A Little Princess and, less pertinently, Y Tu Mamá También — and a new Dumbledore — Michael Gambon, in place of the late Richard Harris — in addition to new roles for the likes of Gary …
The children's book by J.K. Rowling, now a movie by Chris Columbus — maker of, among others, Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, Nine Months, Stepmom, and Bicentennial Man, chief rival of Steven Spielberg for his in-touchness with the Inner Child. No longer applicable, quite plainly, will be the …