Overserious, underfunny prison comedy about a pair of bickersome New York blacks who are railroaded on a murder charge in Mississippi in the early Thirties. (Director Ted Demme, who made the independent Monument Avenue, will not have to turn in his Concerned Citizen card.) Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence begin …
This is a movie with focus on story and credible characters, on universal truths and human struggle. Such is the power of Life, Above All, a tale of courage and conviction that bonds with the viewer like an intimate friendship. The story takes place in modern South Africa and involves …
Hanyi Zhang writes and directs the story of a deceased woman whose soul takes over her son's body in order to plant a tree. In Chinese with English subtitles.
Bertrand Tavernier does what would have seemed improbable if not impossible. He goes at the First World War from a new angle, opens up a new area of experience: that of counting and identifying the corpses following the truce. This is a post-war war movie, a war movie with a …
The inspirational story of the "Jewish Jackie Robinson," the six-foot-four Detroit Tiger first baseman and left fielder in the Thirties and Forties, a magnet at the time for ethnic slurs and a stronger magnet for ethnic pride. (The anecdote of an on-field run-in between the veteran Greenberg and the rookie …
A no account outlaw establishes his own particular brand of law and order and builds a town on the edges of civilization in this farcical western. With the aid of an old law text and unpredictable notions Roy Bean distinguishes between lawbreakers and lawgivers by way of his pistols.
Owen Susskind’s father feared that autism had “kidnapped” his son until a viewing of The Little Mermaid caused the child to break a one-year silence. An Aladdin puppet show soon followed — Dad does a spot-on Gilbert Gottfried — in which father and son began conversing in “Disney dialogue.” But …
With, more factually, Bill Murray in the role of Zissou, an over-the-hill, or over-the-wave, oceanographer cum filmmaker, a cut-rate Cousteau: "What happened to me? Did I lose my talent? Am I ever going to be any good again?" Director Wes Anderson, a critical darling and "indie" bellwether for Bottle Rocket, …
Dying man's last wish: to build his dream house and at the same time bond with his nihilistic, incommunicative, pierced and glue-sniffing son. A feel-gooey movie, deftly photographed (by Vilmos Zsigmond) but brutally, maulingly manipulative. With Kevin Kline, Hayden Christensen, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jena Malone, and Mary Steenburgen; directed by …
Parallel plotlines framed inside a machine-gun high-school massacre, unveiling in flashback the events leading up to it as well as jumping ahead fifteen years to reveal the life of a guilty survivor, now a teacher herself at the school, with a husband and daughter at home. Uma Thurman might be …
Todd Solondz has described this as a “quasi-sequel” to Happiness, a helpful description inasmuch as a dozen years have passed since the quasi-predecessor, and inasmuch as the moviegoer’s memory receives no help whatsoever from the recasting of the principal roles with different players: Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, and …
There is nothing essentially new about an alliance of aliens and vampires (see Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, among lesser examples), but the effects of this alliance have never spread faster nor ever deeper into sexual nooks and crannies. The germ of the story, and a lot of the …
At thirty-two, the lifelong lifeguard faces the question, indelicately phrased by his father, "When will you ever grow up?" The crisis comes in concert with his embarrassing fifteen-year high-school reunion and a prosperous old pal's tantalizing offer of a job in a Porsche dealership. The movie arrives, by and by, …