Tom Hanks cowrote, directed, and stars in this novel pleasantry about a 50-something, all-too-amiable employee of the month. Hanks’s title character is fired at the film’s outset for his lack of education, prompting him to enroll in community college. Enter Julia Roberts as a frustrated speech professor in the midst …
Director Craig Gillespie, of the mainstream Mr. Woodcock, indulges the monkeyshines of Ryan Gosling in the part of an antisocial Minnesota Lutheran who seeks happiness in a chaste relationship with an anatomically correct life-size sex doll. Everyone in town loves him too much, for some unapparent reason, to burst his …
Now that the San Diego Opera is probably closing down, this may be your best bet for grand local opera.
Verdi's opera about the Babylonian conquest of the Jews.
Italian political thriller, fact-based, in the mode of Francesco Rosi, though without his documentary eye. Under Ricky Tognazzi's direction, it's all faces, faces, faces, and talk, talk, talk: the human concern is undoubted. Tognazzi displays a high-minded reluctance to juice up the proceedings -- centered around a determined magistrate, with …
Director Christian Vincent grants us the agreeable sight of two mainstays of the contemporary French cinema -- Daniel Auteuil, Isabelle Huppert -- maneuvering their way expertly through an intimate and articulate little drama of a relationship on the rocks. Very, very little. The whole of it is completely believable and …
Stoutly reactionary animal tale, with a compatible back-to-nature plotline: a skateboarding, MTV-watching, Walkman-wearing Baltimore brat is transplanted to Franklin Falls, Va. (pop. 148), and along the way acquires a stray collie. Or more accurately, the collie, named explicitly after the 1950s TV star, acquires the boy. (Splendid subjective panning shot …
America's introduction to everybody's favorite collie was also Elizabeth Taylor's second feature. Directed by Fred Wilcox.
We open on Rosh Hashanah, a perfect time for 92-year-old bubbie Claire (Rebecca Schull) to disclose to the family a past affiliation with the Nazis. Jeff Lipsky’s (Flannel Pajamas, Twelve Thirty) intimate character drama opens exclusively at Reading Cinemas Town Square. The filmmaker will be in town July 12-14 to …
Arnold Schwarzenegger being a good sport and making fun of himself. But as a manufacturer of fun the movie has the same limitations as, only on a larger scale than, the Schwarzenegger torso: too grotesquely pumped-up, bulging, strained, top-heavy to produce an effect of "lightness." And in making fun of …
M. Night Shyamalan has a go at an old-fashioned Saturday-matinee children’s film, a live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon cartoon series about the boy avatar who alone has the power, if he can learn to master it, to command all the elements of the four rival realms of Air, Water, Earth, …
Joe Talbot makes his directorial debut with a story of a young man searching for his home in a city that seems to have left him behind.
He's done the aviator (Top Gun) and the race-car driver (Days of Thunder). Now Tony Scott, the new traditionalist, turns to the seedy and smart-aleck private detective. (Giving him a faithless wife and a foul-mouthed teenage daughter was a decent idea. Allowing him to incapacitate his foes with a stream …
Seasoned deep-sea divers as they battle the raging elements to rescue their crewmate trapped hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.