Alfonso Cuarón seemingly follows carefully the attractive pattern of Agnieszka Holland's Secret Garden, starting from a lesser known work of the same novelist, Frances Hodgson Burnett. It opens similarly in India in 1914, where the prepubescent heroine has earnestly learned from her father, the oxymoronic Captain Crew(e), the lesson that …
All the old gang -- beanie, derby, cowlick, bowtie, overalls, and all -- living in a time warp in contemporary Los Angeles. Director Penelope Spheeris regularly speeds up the physical action, but there's nothing she can do about the draggy voices, or their piercing pitch. (The spectator, of course, can …
All the old gang -- beanie, derby, cowlick, bowtie, overalls, and all -- living in a time warp in contemporary Los Angeles. Director Penelope Spheeris regularly speeds up the physical action, but there's nothing she can do about the draggy voices, or their piercing pitch. (The spectator, of course, can …
Documentary about the rock 'n' roll icon who helped shape the world of music, directed by Lisa Cortes.
Two mentally gifted pre-teens from opposite sides of the social scale, and of the Atlantic Ocean, recognize one another as kindred spirits through their mutual interest in the philosophy of Heidegger (whom the slightly more worldly boy has, however, outgrown). There is little else in this ingratiating romantic comedy to …
A cool, collected, fourteen-year-old violin virtuoso (Evan Rachel Wood, a sweetie-pie) sets up a pocket-change business as the official secrets-keeper and advice-giver of her neighborhood, and the younger kids are happy to line up and pay fifty cents per secret. But all these secrets, including a whopper of her own, …
It originated in a 1960 Roger Corman shoestringer primarily remembered for a brief appearance by the very young Jack Nicholson as a pain-loving dental patient, and only secondarily for the blood-drinking plant with a small but useful vocabulary ("Feed me!"). Since then it was reincarnated circa 1982 as a stage …
It originated in a 1960 Roger Corman shoestringer primarily remembered for a brief appearance by the very young Jack Nicholson as a pain-loving dental patient, and only secondarily for the blood-drinking plant with a small but useful vocabulary ("Feed me!"). Since then it was reincarnated circa 1982 as a stage …
A moody delight. Domhnall Gleeson brings his uncanny talent for communicating great storms of interior feeling through an expression almost entirely devoid of affect to Lenny Abrahamson’s post-World War II ghost story about the dangers of noblesse oblige. He plays Faraday, a doctor called to the home of the local …
A script co-written by François Truffaut (with Claude de Givray), finally realized by Claude Miller (with the help of two more scriptwriters) four years after Truffaut's death. The children's marching song behind the opening credits, containing the phrase "the best way to walk," reminds us that Miller had directed a …
Joe ‘Deke’ Deacon (Denzel Washington), a Bakersfield cop with a spiritual side (hence the nickname) and a tainted past as an L.A. Detective, is assigned a return trip to his roots to pick up a pair of blood-stained boots. But rather than retrieving the evidentiary material, all Deke seems able …
Defanged vampire comedy, suitable for the entire family, or at least for the juvenile fraction of it, about a San Diego tyke who befriends a boy bloodsucker on a sojourn in Scotland. (Good fun with the local accent.) The best joke may be that the director is the same Uli …
Troubled and troublesome Russian youth -- and a chance for the Westerner to get on the glasnost bandwagon, or at least to apply some grease to its wheels. More exactly, a chance to enjoy (from any of several political vantage points) seeing the Soviets suffer openly where before they had …
Mark Herman's transplant to the screen, minus the first five words of the original title (The Rise and Fall of...), of Jim Cartwright's London stage piece, conceived as a showcase for the unsuspected talents of Jane Horrocks. Some of her abundant talents had of course been well known, from Mike …