A remake and update of the 1945 farce, complete with commensurate inflation: where the earlier hero had to unburden himself of a million dollars in two months, if he was to collect the bigger inheritance, the current figures are thirty million in a month. The central plot problem -- how …
Affected debut film from Rian Johnson, writer and director, a test-tube species of teen noir, a hard-boiled high-school hybrid, featuring a junior detective, a fille fatale, a small-time Mr. Big, and a brawny henchboy. Opaquely plotted, arcanely scripted, darkly photographed, and reverberantly recorded, incomprehensible on several levels. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, …
Glossy women’s film, playing facilely on our sympathies: a Bangladeshi Muslim shipped off to London, at an early age, for an arranged marriage to an oppressive older fatso, eventually courted as she deserves by a hunky young political activist. Nine-Eleven comes along to broaden the horizons further. With Tannishtha Chatterjee, …
Not so much a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein as a continuation of it, starting out in the scientist's laboratory in the midst of a thunderstorm, and asking the question: what if they hadn't all perished that night? (And what if the scientist's latest creation had looked like Jennifer …
A Jane Austen-pattern fairy tale cut out of the gaudy fabric of a Bollywood musical. After pointlessly altering the first word of the familiar title, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach, Bend It Like Beckham) aggressively pushes the third word into the realm of race relations, as an Ugly …
Certainly not the only, but perhaps the single greatest, exception to the rule about sequels never surpassing their forerunners. A lively and densely packed hour and a quarter, overrun by an unsuppressed sense of humor, it begins with a one-stormy-night prologue in which the story is resumed by Mary Shelley …
An ageless (over a period of two decades) Alma Mahler, née Schindler, and her constellation of artsy swains: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, the writer Franz Werfel. The viewer is expected to swoon at the headiness of it all: the name-dropping ("Strauss loved …
The Evelyn Waugh novel revisited, at roughly a fourth the length of the early-Eighties TV miniseries. Matthew Goode, as the self-professed atheist artist Charles Ryder, murmurs his way through the pages of a radical rewrite (particularly the gay abandon): first year at Oxford, the tormented Catholics of Brideshead manor, Venice, …
Subpar Chabrol, a further cure for the mindless habit of affixing to his work the label of "a Chabrol thriller," let alone "a Hitchcockian thriller." Despite its origins (same as those of his La Cérémonie) in the oeuvre of the incomparable Ruth Rendell, it little resembles a thriller of any …
Through a booking mix-up, two “inseparable” girlfriends are locked into simultaneous June weddings at the Plaza Hotel, whereupon they take leave of their senses in their efforts to sabotage one another. A deviously insulting chick flick. Anne Hathaway, although she looks like she’s in training for a concentration-camp film, doesn’t …
Clint Eastwood grappling, both behind and in front of the camera, with the Robert James Waller bestseller about a four-day affair between a nomadic National Geographic photographer and an Italian-Iowan farm wife (Meryl Streep). Whatever has been or could be said about this being an American Brief Encounter, and about …
Sharon Maguire's pale and wan visualization of the unfunny non-novel by Helen Fielding, about the plight of the average, over-thirty, ever so slightly overweight, overdrinking, and oversmoking "singleton" woman in a world -- or in a United Kingdom, at least -- of male "fuckwits." Attempts to punch up the humor …
A case of ill-advised expansionism, not so much (or not just) in the sense of Renée Zellweger packing the pounds back on (without polishing up her English accent), but in the sense of a modestly profitable corner cookie store envisioning itself as the next Mrs. Fields. Granted, it's well within …
The re-staging of Operation Market Garden, the Allies' ill-conceived attempt to capture a string of Nazi-occupied Dutch bridges, takes three hours on screen, and the complex logistics of the attack seem sufficient in themselves to hold your interest for that long. But the chief reason for the film's largeness is …
The children's story by Katherine Paterson brings together two junior-high pariahs, a picked-on "artistic" farmboy, solitary brother of four sisters, and a new girl next door, imaginative daughter of two novelists, and sends them off into a woodsy fantasyland of their own making, across the creek on a rope swing. …