The film begins as its story ends — with the handsome, introspective lead character (Tom Hiddleston) picking through the rubble of a broken building, finding a dog, bringing it back to his ruined apartment, then slaughtering it and roasting its hind leg on a spit while cheerful classical music streams …
By way of Turkey, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal. The hope, apparently, is that a generous amount of geography, costumes, explosions, aerial photography, and so forth, will be perceived as High Adventure, and no matter that Brian Hutton has directed the thing with all the care and precision of a second-class …
A pair of enterprising young sativa scholars, destined to ace the principal’s newly announced mandatory school-wide drug test, decide to even the playing field by plying the entire graduating class with cannabis brownies. Without enough laughs and gags to support it, the solid foundation for a stoner comedy dissipates faster …
Candy-colored sequel to two Disney Channel television movies with which the viewer is presumed to be conversant. (In what way, you might have to wonder, did Gabriella change East High forever? And what’s the deal between Troy and Rocket Man?) Evidently intended as an anti-anxiety pill for growing tweens, it …
Comedy about the authentic and the fake, mainly as manifested among artists and their appreciators, on the island of Rhodes -- all very civilized and sophisticated, if a bit academically and yawningly so. (Somebody inevitably quips, "It's all Greek to me.") Chris Menges's imagery shows somewhat better attention to the …
Fitting capper to the cycle of Warner Brothers gangster films of the 1930s (the director, Raoul Walsh, would remake it eight years later as a Western), with Humphrey Bogart as a just-freed ex-convict (good haircut) who immediately resumes his life of crime, but in cahoots with hotheaded next-generation punks. A …
Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra star in Charles Walters' musical remake of The Philadelphia Story.
Neil Jordan, unbending a bit after Mona Lisa and A Company of Wolves, defends a genuinely haunted Irish castle against capitalist American plans to transport it to Malibu as a theme park; or in other words, defends Old World values against New ones. ("No respectable ghost would ever live in …
A dancer who didn't fit in. A musician who didn't belong. Good thing they're both beautiful. Directed and co-written by Michael Damien.
Step up to this musical romance.
Slight, retiring, wallflowery movie with a stout, commanding, towering performance by Judy Davis as a hard-drinking, bottom-rung "entertainer" who must confront the daughter she long ago abandoned. Some nice tacky atmosphere, though an air of bookishness too (short-novel-ishness, to be more exact). Directed by Gillian Armstrong, who provided the same …
A political thriller of nebulous sympathies, set someplace in the Third World and populated by tyrants, terrorists, foreign business investors, and a pair of mercenaries formerly of the U.S. Marines. There is nothing in the course of this flippant male-camaraderie action movie ("You love it as much as I do," …
A small-town trumpet-playing barber and a runaway rock-'n'-roll roadie transport a drug-stuffed cadaver from Canada to New Orleans, pursued by a greasy Mephistopheles. Would-be off-center comedy is more truthfully altogether off the map -- despite the large amount of geographical exactitude (the boyhood home of Bob Dylan, etc.). With Don …
Director John Lee Hancock (The Founder) mounts a valiant effort to stretch a solid genre picture into an American epic with the tale of two ex-Texas Rangers — put out to pasture because of their willingness to shoot first and say “hands up” later — who get pressed back into …