Errol Morris ushers us into the world, or at least over its doorsill, of English cosmologist Stephen Hawking, stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) in his early twenties, losing the use of his body and eventually his voice, and now getting around in a motorized wheelchair and communicating …
Vittorio De Sica's second-to-last movie, released post-humously. The blue-collar heroine, tubercular, is packed off, for a breather from family and factory, to a breathtaking mountaintop sanatorium, and just as she embarks on an extramarital romance with a fellow patient she is pronounced fit and sent back home. Out of this …
The coming-of-age rite with a distinct literary flavor: Richard Ford has pieced together the screenplay from a couple of his own short stories, and the resulting creation has an unorganic quality, a lurching, Frankenstein's-monster quality. Lili Taylor, as a young woman of dubious character who is on a mission to …
A movie completely absorbed by a man completely absorbed by himself -- fringed with some so-what details about the dragging-down drug scene, the death of a parent, a broken love bond, and life at a New Yorker-ish magazine pseudonymously called Gotham. In the last-named arena, Jason Robards salvages a few …
Rather more yellowness, actually, than brightness, at least on the visual level. The narrative is even dimmer, a father-son conflict involving magic poison, a magic post, a magic necklace, a magic prism, a magic bone, a magic this, a magic that. The magic all works, but it doesn't "play." Directed …
Better than average Neil Simon piece, perhaps because a semi-autobiographical one -- like, for instance, the above-average and semi-autobiographical Chapter Two. The Neil Simon character here is a sex-starved teenager (and would-be either writer or New York Yankee) in the Brooklyn of 1937, but the author sees the entire household …
As recounted by Jane Campion, unusually taking sole screenwriting credit in addition to directing, the ill-starred love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne is such as to make us ask ourselves when we last had on screen a love story we could believe in. (In the Mood for Love, …
Stephen Fry's admiring, not to say admirable, adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, a moralistic social satire to do with the hard-partying idle rich in England entre les guerres, but with obvious "relevance" to today: materialism, hedonism, drugs, sex, sleazoid press, and so on. The sloppy direction leaves you grasping …
Sub-Pinter social satire by Dennis (Pennies from Heaven) Potter, about a smarmy young stranger who insinuates himself into a suburban London household and shines a light into its dark corners. What does the stranger himself hope to get out of it, besides some sexual relations with the vegetalized daughter of …
Steve Martin as a divorced tax lawyer seeking companionship in an Internet chatroom, finding the ample, the abundant Queen Latifah, fresh out of prison: the uptight white and the up-front black. Predictable but not disagreeable. The two stars could play this in their sleep, yet they give every appearance of …
Minor Martin Scorsese, but in view of recent performance, minor is an improvement. Major Scorsese (Kundun, Casino, The Age of Innocence) is pretentious Scorsese, puffed-up Scorsese, inflated Scorsese. This one, an anti-valentine to New York City in the pre-Giuliani years of the decade, is an unmistakable companion piece to his …
Screwball comedy involving, among others, a paleontologist, a society girl with an uncorrectable high opinion of herself and an unstoppable word flow, a fox terrier who has stolen and buried a priceless brontosaurus bone, a big-game hunter, and a pet leopard whose temper can be soothed by the singing of …
Peppy youth film on competitive cheerleading, with neither the nerve to play it straight nor nerve to play it snide. A wobbly compromise. And a nimbly diplomatic performance by Kirsten Dunst. With Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union; directed by Peyton Reed.
A gang of comical crooks, rousted from the pages of Damon Runyon, knocks over the Brink's stronghold in Boston and is all set to live high on the hog the rest of their lives, when one of their members, played by Warren Oates, double-crosses them by going straight (as opposed …
A comedy of varying shades of lightness, about a romantic triangle among the hard-driven workers on a network news team. Writer-director James L. Brooks often seems to draw on, and polish up, his previous work in series television. The anchorman who represents style over substance (William Hurt) is a realistic …