Documentary from Nelson George about the rise and fall and rise of Misty Copeland, the first black ballerina to perform as a prima ballerina with the American Ballet Theater.
Fly-on-the-wall doc about Justin Peck — a 25-year-old member of the New York City corps de ballet — and his effort to create an original work for the company. (He got the gig, we are told, because of his success at the New York Choreographic Institute.) The fly is very …
Introductory lecture (Marian Seldes, the not overly familiar narrator) on the post-revolutionary Russian refugees who laid the foundation of modern ballet, namely the Ballet Russe and its warring spinoffs, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo vs. the Original Ballet Russe, Leonide Massine vs. Wasily de Basil (and companies). The supplementary …
Antonio Banderas vs. Lucy Liu, rival undercover agents in a storm of fireballs, crumpled cars, thudding and shrieking rock music. But they're not "versus" for long; they team up against a common foe (common as dirt), a good deal for Banderas, because Liu was chilling him with her superior cool. …
A retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck and Oskar Homolka.
An animal picture for highbrows. Robert Bresson's episodic chronicle of the martyrization of a humble donkey is a sort of Christian existentialist version of Will James's horse story, Smoky, only not so credible in its plotting. Among devout Bressonites, this is sometimes said to be one of his supreme achievements, …
The world's greatest pool players, real and fictional, face each other in a movie not worthy of the neighborhood-bar variety. The only interest is in watching James Coburn and Omar Sharif making some of their own shots, and in wondering how many takes were required. Directed by Robert Ellis Miller.
Love of literature, love of music, love of the opposite sex, survive amid the repressive rigors of a Maoist "re-education" camp in the lush green mountains, and open up the wider world to a local village girl. Mostly sweet; a hint of bitter in the years-later epilogue. Dai Sijie directs …
In this storyless and humanless paean to woodland creatures (Man is regarded as the eternal enemy, the bringer of fire, destruction, death), the Disney animators are able to give free rein to their appreciation of the natural world, of Romantic landscape, of animals' little idiosyncrasies, of types of weather and …
Spike Lee, in confrontational mode, serves up a new generation's Putney Swope, the blaxploitation-era satire by Robert Downey (Jr.'s father) about a black takeover of a Madison Avenue ad agency. The comparable premise here concerns a prissy Harvard-educated African-American TV executive (Damon Wayans), under pressure from his blacker-than-thou white boss …
Sometimes the worst enemies make the best friends. April (screenwriter Hannah Marks) could just as easily have pretended she was not Nick’s (Dylan Sprouse) ex and deleted Clara’s (Liana Liberato, liberating a gift for light comedy) phone number when the two came face-to-face at a party. But it turns out …