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 …
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, …
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 No longer applicable, quite plainly, will be the …
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 No longer applicable, quite plainly, will be the …
Ron Davis's documentary about a man who buys a horse slated for the slaughterhouse and rides him to glory.
David Ayer resumes his self-appointed role as police watchdog, this time as director in addition to screenwriter (Training Day, Dark Blue). The man he has his eye on, a very disturbed veteran of the action in Afghanistan, is not already a policeman but soon hopes to be. When, however, he …
WWII movie, revamped for the new millennium in its voguish imagery of alternating monochromes (blue and brown, predominantly) and in the operatic proportions of its protagonist's agonies. Tales of plucky POWs, however, make up a rather minor subdivision of the genre (Stalag 17, The Great Escape, never mind Hogan's Heroes), …
Tempest in a teapot: two undefeated Ivy League rivals meet in the final game of the football season, 1968. (Vietnam-era politics come into it, but only slightly.) Dozens of players from both sides, including Tommy Lee Jones for Harvard, but not including star running back Calvin Hill for Yale, share …
The tagline is "Love goes cucking frazy." You take it from there.
Sponsored, if that's the word, or endorsed, by Jodie Foster, this French film introduces American audiences to Mathieu Kassovitz, one of the many spawn of Martin Scorsese, farther-flung than most, documenting twenty-four volatile hours in the lives of three angry young men in the housing projects outside Paris. In significant …
Quentin Tarantino's restaging of the Civil War in a Wyoming bar owes more to Agatha Christie than it does John Ford’s Stagecoach. What was it about this cramped, underdeveloped parlor drama – the majority of which takes place on one set – that caused Tarantino to think 70mm? The frigid …
Quentin Tarantino's restaging of the Civil War in a Wyoming bar owes more to Agatha Christie than it does John Ford’s Stagecoach. What was it about this cramped, underdeveloped parlor drama – the majority of which takes place on one set – that caused Tarantino to think 70mm? The frigid …