It’s tempting to call director Alexander Payne’s latest a kind of Dead Poets Society for grownups. Not that Peter Weir’s film was childish. But Payne’s is definitely more adult, both in its sensibility and its focus. There is the obvious similarity of setting and aesthetic: a private school for boys …
A curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a prestigious American school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually he forms an unlikely bond with one of them -- a damaged, brainy troublemaker (newcomer Dominic Sessa) -- and with …
Severely strained kiddie film adapted from a much-decorated novel by Louis Sachar. Three plotlines -- the origins of a hundred-fifty-year-old family curse in Latvia; interracial love, bigotry, and revenge in the Wild West; a juvenile hard-labor camp in present-day Texas -- keep interrupting one another and impeding momentum. The third …
Writer and director Nancy Meyers arranges an Internet home exchange, for two weeks at Christmastime, between two wounded women desperate to get away: a London newspaper columnist (Kate Winslet) with a cozy cottage in Surrey, and a Hollywood trailer-cutter (Cameron Diaz) with a modernist mansion in Beverly Hills. The agreed-upon …
As a film for all seasons — one that features musical numbers celebrating everything from Christmas to the 4th of July — 1942’s Holiday Inn was the first (and finest) of three movies to include Bing Crosby chirping “White Christmas.” The star also groans Irving Berlin’s holiday anthem in Blue …
With help from a Salvation Army Santa and a little holiday magic, a workaholic executive tries to let go of her painful past to become the twinkling light that both her community and family need. Written & Directed by Stephanie Garvin.
John Krasinski directs and stars in a family dramedy involving, wait for it, an uncertain young man on the cusp of fatherhood who returns to his hometown when his mother falls ill. With Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anna Kendrick, Charlie Day, Sharlto Copley, Richard Jenkins, and Margo Martindale as Mom.
Good creepy title, even if it was already taken (for one of the Gideon Fell mysteries by John Dickson Carr). The more fitting title, Invisible Man, was already taken, too, but the present title fits well enough when our latter-day invisible man (a cocky, smart-assy Kevin Bacon: "I am a …
An abused child in a broken marriage in present-day Bath (Jane Austen's old stomping ground). The father now lives with his homosexual lover; the abuser is the mother's new live-in boyfriend, a man's-man construction worker. Getting the truth out into the open, getting the right people to believe it, getting …
Woody Allen, besides writing and directing, plays a has-been filmmaker whose chance at a comeback comes in the form of a bone thrown to him by his former wife -- a $60 million remake of a Forties B-movie -- who is now consort to the philistine head of Galaxy Pictures. …
Director Ibrahim Nash'at spent a year with the Taliban in the wake of the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Risking his life in the war-torn nation, Nash'at is on the ground with the Taliban when they enter an American base loaded with a portion of the roughly $7 …
Deplorable cop film from director Ron Shelton, doubly deplorable since it follows so close on the heels of his respectable cop film, Dark Blue. That one, of course, was accorded a delayed and a limited release and was attended by perhaps forty-two paying customers nationwide. This one, having learned its …
Floyd Mutrux, in desperate search of the youth audience, plunges into an abyss of unscrupulousness and unoriginality, leeching mostly off American Graffiti (the one-long-night duration, the incessant goldie-oldies, the drive-in, the drag races, the high-school dance, the ominous shadow of Vietnam), with the actual gags lifted more often from Animal …