Keira Knightley makes the men around her seem like disposable utensils. Sam Worthington is stuck playing her dull husband, whose interest crazily drifts to sultry, big-lipped Eva Mendes. Their drab one-nighter alternates with sexy Keira’s New York dangling of a former love, played by Guillaume Canet like a buff baguette. …
The title refers not to the night before today, but to the last night ever. At midnight, the world is scheduled to come to an end, never mind how or why. That's simply a given. The characters all accept it. There is no struggle against the inevitable. There is only …
It’s been a grand year for Edgar Wright, with back-to-back releases of his two most stylistically intuitive works to date: the documentary The Sparks Brothers and this sumptuously mod throwback to the swinging’ 60s when Carnaby Street was the style center of the world. It’s a period Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) …
“They’re real sticklers for the rules these days, not like in my time,” says Errol Flynn (Kevin Kline) while effortlessly trying to put across Hollywood’s attitude towards May/December romances to star-struck Florence Aadland (Susan Sarandon), the mother of his 15-year-old mistress, Beverly (Dakota Fanning). The Last of Robin Hood chronicles …
The Kansas City jazz kings of the Twenties and Thirties are commemorated in some charming archival footage and publicity stills, but mostly in newly shot footage in which the survivors get together again to play and to reminisce. It is something like a home movie of a Thanksgiving Day gathering …
Tall corn about the discovery of a hidden valley of changeless Cheyenne Indians in the mountains of northwest Montana. The interplay between an atavistic frontiersman (Tom Berenger, amusingly chewing up the gorgeous scenery) and a comely anthropologist (Barbara Hershey) is corn, too, but canned. With Kurtwood Smith and Steve Reevis; …
Clichés from the clean-cops-dirty-feds stockpile, dished out in comic-strip dialogue ("Fuck the backup! Let's go!" and "Hey, what's that dirt-bag Fast Eddie doin' here?"). Some good L.A. locations captured by Brit director John Mackenzie. With Brian Dennehy, Joe Pantoliano, Jeff Fahey, and Deborra-Lee Furness (the tough Aussie biker of Shame).
The James Fenimore Cooper tale of the French and Indian War has survived its demolition by Mark Twain and has gone on to have several screen versions made of it, with varying degrees of recognizability. The story in this one -- your basic boys' adventure of protecting the white women …
Mawkish Neil Simon idea about an average Nice Guy, striving to rejuvenate his self-confidence with a middle-years extramarital fling. He gets nowhere fast, which could also be said of Alan Arkin in a role as monotonously strident as this. Sally Kellerman, Paula Prentiss, and Renee Taylor as prospective playmates all …
An elegy on an entire generation -- the one that came of age during the Second World War -- but narrowly focussed on four East London drinking buddies, and most particularly on the two whose friendship dates to the North African theater of the war. The title, from the Booker …
Steve Martin as the would-be Woody of Los Angeles: or in other words, daring at last to poke his head out of the closet of eggheadism. The sole scriptwriter on the project, Martin has a fund of observations on the lifestyle thereabouts, embellished (and befogged) with exaggeration and fantasy, and …
Peter Bogdanovich's cardboard re-creation of smalltown life in the Fifties (Anarene, Texas, to be exact) is done with a plethora of time-capsule artifacts (hit records, books, movies, magazines, and fashions of the period), a multitude of stereotypes, a minimum of feeling, and a patchwork of diverse Hollywood movie styles (Ford, …
Portrait of a small-town stock car racetrack and the tribe of blue-collar drivers that call it home, struggling to hold onto an American racing tradition as the world around them is transformed by globalization and commercialization.