Adrian Lyne's decade-long labor of love, a faithful remake of the Nabokov novel, true to the period of the novel, true to the narrative of the novel, truer than Kubrick, bends over backwards to win sympathy for the infamous Humbert Humbert (in the pity-please performance of Jeremy Irons), the visiting …
The casting is a little off, all along the front line -- Sue Lyon, James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, with the latter two, particularly, tripping into merry caricature. The excesses may be under director Kubrick's behest, for they are habitually his dish; still, despite a few mistaken dips into …
The chichi ’60s credit design and blunt, bitchy observational chatter that opened the film held promise. While vacationing in Biarritz, a Parisian fashionista (Julie Delpy), desperately in need of having her “chimney swept,” falls for a small-town IT geek (Dany Boon) and fellow divorcée, just days away from accepting a …
Colin Farrell, all grown up and polished smooth, plays a roughneck ex-con trying to escape the unsavory associations of his past (greasy Ben Chaplin) and embrace the associations of his decidedly brighter future (reclusive actress-in-need-of-protection Keira Knightley). The story? Hoary. But the cast is masterful, especially Ray Winstone as a …
Somewhere along the line, it may occur to you that Babak Najafi’s sequel to 2013’s president-in-peril pic Olympus Has Fallen is a sly attack on America masquerading as a celebration of same. It’s more than the one-man-army absurdity of aging security chief Gerard Butler as he winningly fights the war …
Possibly a one-hundred-percent accurate portrait of the drug-culture riffraff of the Notting Hill district, but given the dialect, the slang, and the quality of the recorded sound, no more than seventy-five percent of it comes through as comprehensible. And the scope of the portrait is, in the first place, narrower …
There have been musicals about mass murderers (Rent, Sweeney Todd), but none as monotonously tasteless as this talk-singing account of the 2006 killings of five prostitutes in the titular working-class neighborhood. The film is adapted from a stage play, and it shows in every frame. Still, it’s commendable for its …
A monumental achievement in cinema-as-time-travel. Writer-director Julien Temple (Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury) and his frequent editor, Caroline Richards, availed themselves of the opportunity to boil down 800 hours of sparklingly restored archival footage into a chronicle of modern-day London. The duo fling wide "the Gate of God," …
Survival often relies on scheming. With nothing but innate resourcefulness and a pair of run-ins with angelic Clash frontman Joe Strummer (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) to guide him, 15-year-old Shay (Daniel Huttlestone) is left the daunting task of salvaging his bedridden dad’s struggling enterprises: piano shop by day, taxi driver by …
Director Julia Loktev’s adaptation of Tom Bissell’s claustrophobic short story, set in a place that is anything but: the Caucasus Mountains. At issue is manhood, or at least, how a man responds in the moment. Alex (a bearded Gael Garcia Bernal) and Nica (a redheaded Hani Furstenberg), adventurous and engaged …
The periodic drunken bender of a New Frontier cowboy lands him, for once, in more trouble than he bargained for, and the trouble escalates into a test of his survival and his self-image in the modern world. The symbols of the Age of Technology are a little heavy-handedly drawn, but …
Shy outcast Kokoro has been avoiding school for weeks when she discovers a portal in her bedroom mirror. She reaches through and finds herself transported to an enchanting castle where she is joined by six other students. When a girl in a wolf mask explains that they have been invited …
Typical Harold Robbins saga of a woman writer's bruising ascent up the Hollywood mountain. She begins (in braids and Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farm frock) as a mere San Fernando Valley high-school girl, an "A" student with an Einstein poster on her bedroom wall, and a prize-recipient for Creative Writing. Her first step towards …