It’s Mama Frankenstein as fangirl in this soporific account of what led the titular character (Elle Fanning) to pen the greatest monster novel in all creation. Between the wicked stepmother, the princely hero (Douglas Booth, playing the radical poet Percy Shelley as an 18th-century Conrad Birdie), and sets that look …
Director Kenneth Branagh -- not Mary Shelley -- has obviously done some dutiful research on the Romantic Era from which the original novel sprang. (Correct full title: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.) And the products of these researches have armed him with an excuse for any old expressive excess, and …
Thanks, presumably, to the success of Wild Reeds, this slightly earlier and better André Téchiné film gets its chance -- although, lacking the nostalgic, coming-of-age, homosexual, and political hooks, a slim one. The main characters and situation are credible -- an estranged sister and brother obliged in middle age to …
The sense of humor in this smart-ass service comedy is actually more sick-making than all the bloody operating room splish-splashing. The gags are constructed to have a practical-joke thrust: there is always a victim and a violator. The jokers are a couple of barbarians, conceitedly acted by Elliott Gould and …
Comic-book fantasy about a nebbishy bank clerk who fishes a 4th- or 5th-century Scandinavian mask out of the bay, and is transformed by it into the pea-headed embodiment -- pea-like in color, that is, not size, and canned not frozen -- of his wildest dreams. There's no stinting on the …
Star-studded cast in a dim, disjointed, desultory satire about an over-the-hill folkie named Jack Fate, tabbed to headline a benefit concert in an ill-defined police state. Bob Dylan, besides playing the lead, co-wrote (with director Larry Charles) the self-referential script, but his assorted cryptic and gnomic comments provide little illumination. …
Husband. Pastor. Wrestler. Hero. Inspired by true events! Warren Sonoda directs the story of a former wrestler who becomes a pastor and then starts fighting crime.
It’s a race between the British Secret Service and Dr. Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff) to find the lost tomb of Genghis Khan. The Brits had best be the first to break ground lest the merciless Chinese madman — with a British Accent and decked out in an Asian woman’s ceremonial …
The difference of one letter -- "s" rather than "r" -- marks rather than masks the difference between a remake and a sequel. In the cumbersome quarter-hour prologue, the original Zorro (Anthony Hopkins -- and what's the use of a mask when you're the only man in Old California who …
Bob Swaim has attempted again to append a footnote beneath Webster's definition of "romantic love," to pencil some scholia in the margin, perhaps to stretch a disputed border or annex some unclaimed territory -- in specific, to define love around some not very lovable characters, and under not very favorable …
Two African-American women, breaking different ground: freshwoman Jasmine (Zoe Renee) is advancing up the road to academia, while Prof. Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) is the first black woman to assume the post of residence hall “Master” of a New England college. Her classmates snicker upon learning of Jasmine’s accommodation, but …
Happily, and despite the fact that director Paul Thomas Anderson used controversial Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard as a model, The Master is more than a modernized rehash of the religious chicanery at the heart of Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Rather, it is an exploration of broken humanity in …
The first screen incarnation of Lucky Jack Aubrey, hero of Patrick O'Brian's loved and admired series of historical adventure novels, captain of the British man-of-war, the HMS Surprise. This is preeminently a boys' story, and as pure and innocent a specimen as you are apt to find anymore, uncorrupted by …