The self-conferred title of Ugandan strongman, and madman, Idi Amin Dada, a facile role for Forest Whitaker, who pitches into it with gusto. The true central character, however, is a fictitious young Scottish doctor (James McAvoy), the President's personal physician, "closest advisor," illicit lover of Wife Number Three, and all-around …
Americanization, and if it doesn't go without saying, vulgarization, of the Italian film of the same name, a fear-of-adulthood seriocomedy centered around a tight-knit group of pushing-thirties. The young cast has some glaring weak spots -- Zach Braff looks as if he'd prefer to turn it into a lighter comedy, …
Hectic sex comedy, almost Restoration-like in its worldly-wise cynicism and indulgence, revolving around five Italian best buddies on the brink of thirty. One of them, the pivotal one, is an unmarried father-to-be with a wandering eye for an eighteen-year-old blonde, a sort of Florentine "Marcia Brady." One is a recent …
F.W. Murnau's chronicle of a hotel doorman's grievous degradation, when he's demoted to lavatory attendant and has to swap his fancy drum major's uniform for a barber's plain white coat, and (for strictly commercial reasons) his sudden, miraculous redemption and exaltation. Done without a single title card, excepting the one …
There is enough handwritten communication exchanged in Shunji Iwai’s deceptively uncomplicated romance to fill a small post office branch. And no junk mail! This archly romantic drama based on memory and mistaken identity opens, fittingly enough, at a funeral followed immediately by a high school reunion. Zhihua (Zhou Xun), unable …
A glossy but visceral “National Geographic entertainment” in which we follow a lioness in Botswana, exiled from her pride and desperately hunting for her three cubs (they don’t all make it). Stunning images in the wild but also a heavy hand of drama pressed along by Jeremy Irons’s grave, pompous …
Walter Hill's remake and resettlement of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and so Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars as well, in a Texas border town during Prohibition. (The warring factions have now metamorphosed into Irish and Italian bootlegging mobs, and the transient Man-with-No-Name christens himself with the classic alias of "John Smith.") …
The subject of marital separation and divorce is eyed without much comprehension (a running gag lumps divorce together with such other social viruses as "police strikes, women's lib, gay lib, condominiums"), but with a good deal of furrowed-brow concern. The movie seems a decade or so late, either a little …
After five years of war in Syria, Aleppo's remaining residents prepare themselves for a siege in this Sundance-approved documentary.
With Eastwood, Stallone, and Schwarzenegger lighting up screens in the ‘90s, one had very little time to devote to the mulletted likes of ancillary action heroes Chuck Norris or Jean-Claude Van Damme. The bar was reset for the latter with the release of JCVD. With one foot extended high over …
François Truffaut's entry in the parade of sorrowful and pitiful movies about France under the Occupation is really more of a companion piece to his Day for Night, except that whereas the latter proposed a toast to movie people, this one is addressed to theater people, and only incidentally to …
Kid-friendly end-of-the-world science fiction (adult-tolerant) revolving around a Seattle brother and sister who find a toybox from the future, and inside it a flop-eared stuffed bunny by the name of Mimzy. The founder and studio head of New Line Cinema, Bob Shaye, trusted himself to direct his first film, and …
Adaptation of a mid-19th-century novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the bellwethers in the corruption of the Romantic Movement: the depletion of the heroic individualist and the ascendance of the femme fatale, the man-eater, the succubus, the vampire. The titular mistress, a native of Spain, land of Carmen (her literary …
Disclaimer: any film featuring both Brian Cox and Udo Kier automatically earns a recommendation. Three years have passed, and just when Sam (Zach Avery) believes he’d come to terms with the shooting of his late girlfriend (Samara Weaving), her doppelgänger — give or take a blonde dye job — appears, …
Not to be confused with The Last Picture Show, from the same year. This is Dennis Hopper's encore to Easy Rider, made under the delusion that everyone would be fascinated to hear anything he had to say. The result is somebody's definition of self-indulgent, and somebody else's definition of personal. …