The sight of Annabelle belted in the back seat of the Warren’s car as she’s chauffeured home to the relative safety of the family’s prized collection of demon memorabilia opened the show with a grin. In no time, the smile turned upside down. Here’s a horror sequel that wants to …
The sight of Annabelle belted in the back seat of the Warren’s car as she’s chauffeured home to the relative safety of the family’s prized collection of demon memorabilia opened the show with a grin. In no time, the smile turned upside down. Here’s a horror sequel that wants to …
Not since Telly Savalas went head-to-head with "Talking Tina" on Rod Serling's Twilight Zone has there been a killer doll as terrifying as Annabelle. This prequel directed by David F. Sandberg conjures up the origins of the devious doll.
Blumhouse's 2025 Halfway to Halloween
Garbo, showing off her famous thick ankles, and looking generally dumpy and discouraged as a waterfront tramp, appears in her historic, first talking role ("Gif me a viskey and don' be stingy," and so on). The movie itself, one of seven Garbo vehicles directed by Clarence Brown, is hopelessly stagy, …
Admittedly, yours truly is not the most informed critical voice to heed when it comes to assessing stodgy British costume dramas. (I tend to side with Francois Truffaut, who once referred to "British cinema" as an oxymoron.) Still, soon after the bits of choreographed slapstick at the film's opening, it …
Notwithstanding the incidental Tchaikovsky, a predominantly British-accented rendition of the Tolstoy story, with an incongruously French-accented title character. Well-dressed but starchy and leaden. Streamlined to the point of effacement. With Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean, Alfred Molina, Mia Kirshner, James Fox, Fiona Shaw; written and directed by Bernard Rose.
By-the-numbers military training exercise: a sensitive riveter, not content just to build ships, joins the Naval Academy on a promise to his late mother. There's a withholding father, a hard-ass drill instructor, a roly-poly lagging roommate, a foxy female officer, and a boxing tournament for proving manhood. James Franco might …
Helen Mirren narrates a documentary about five survivors of the Holocaust who reunite to commemorate what would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday. Lest we forget.
Not especially imaginative documentary: the standard salad of interviews, prosaic narration (Kenneth Branagh), and photographic records. Yet we realize from the age of the interviewees how near we are to the end of the living memory of these events, and the story gets told in considerable detail, and the only …
Stodgy BBC type treatment of the stormy marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, with the unflatteringly photographed players dressed to look like pincushions and talking themselves, and their audience, to death. Genevieve Bujold, Richard Burton; directed by Charles Jarrott.
Urban Outfitters plays at The Rialto, while down the street at the Orpheum, an audience is packed to the rafters, watching The Ape of God, starring Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), an incendiarily disruptive stand-up comic/performance artist who makes Nick Cannon look like Andy Kaufman. (The biggest laugh from his set …
Going-through-the-motions filming of the Broadway hit. On past evidence, no one would imagine that director John Huston has any special aptitude for musicals. Or on present evidence either. His first-ever musical, after three dozen movies and more than twice that many years, is big, slow, and ugly. Albert Finney, doing …