The saga of a mountain man, salted with uncomfortable, self-conscious "legendary" qualities — ballads, hammily colloquial narration, quaint dialogue. With the actors (especially golden-haired Robert Redford) trying to be lovable, and with Pollack's direction trying for aloof, expensive pictorializing, any sense of frontier hardship is blockaded from the screen.
Lydia Tenaglia’s alternately dreamy and gossipy documentary about celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower is heavy on the “celebrity” and frustratingly short on the “chef.” Yes, it’s probably worth knowing that his hard-partying, world-traveling, deeply neglectful parents left him alone for extended periods, such that he spent a lot of time in …
Christian Petzold’s German translation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Of course James Cain held no patent on deadly love triangles, and indeed the cucumber harvest here brings to mind Elmore Leonard’s facsimile, The Big Bounce — not the dreadful movie remake of 2004 but the underappreciated …
Tom Cruise, in the role of a high-flying sports agent who belatedly finds some scruples ("Who had I become? Just another shark in a suit?") and in consequence loses all his clients but one, is more tightly wound than usual. And he comes more thoroughly, rapidly, and frequently unwound than …
Old man (Clint Eastwood, 84) makes movie about old musical group (Frankie Valli, 80, and The Four Seasons) and manages to keep the whole enterprise from getting either stiff in the joints or whiffy with nostalgia. It's a neat piece of work, accomplished partly through the risky trick of having …
We've been through something like this before with Kevin Smith. It went by the name of Chasing Amy, and Ben Affleck was again Smith's on-screen stand-in as a Responsible Adult. Here those responsibilities extend to the filial and the parental, but only briefly the marital. (The sole time and place …
Native signers bring the story of Jesus to life from a deaf perspective. Directed by Joseph Josselyn.
Norman Jewison's pre-sold youth movie. It has vibrant electronic music (played at perilous volume), a legion of agile young bodies, a clean and aromatic environment, and a beach-y color scheme of sky-blues and desert-tans. All it needs, beyond that, is a subject worthy of its buoyant production values — something …