Doomsday documentary on the imminent destruction of Planet Earth if earthlings don't change their ways. As laid out by a big panel of deep thinkers, the what's-gone-wrong part of the film (roughly two-thirds of it) is pretty depressing; the what-can-be-done part (the remaining third) is not commensurately encouraging. Narrated in …
Grandfather and grandson swap personalities, and reverse the digits in their ages, after plowing the Rolls into a storefront. The old man's body remains laid up at the hospital, while his soul does handsprings inside a college freshman: this arrangement allows George Burns to fire off some interior-monologue wisecracks without …
The sighting of a stray Japanese submarine off the California coast ignites a slapstick panic which might more revealingly have been titled The Japs Are Coming, The Japs Are Coming. Steven Spielberg must have figured that if Stanley Kramer could resuscitate slapstick comedy (cf. It'a a Mad, Mad [etc.] World), …
Conservative thinking-type person Dinesh D'Souza tries to unravel the mystery of Obama the President by investigating Obama the man — or rather, Obama the son of his anticolonial father. The film gets off to an interesting start: D'Souza is an ingratiating investigator, and he pays a fair amount of attention …
A dramatization of the twenty-year correspondence between New York litterata Helene Hanff and a London book dealer she never met. This basic material, with its excessive necessity for voice-over recitations, will hardly commend itself beforehand as very intrinsically cinematic; and the deep-rooted reverence for books at the core of it …
Frankenstein's monster gets his name in the title, but Lon Chaney's Wolfman and Bela Lugosi's Dracula are here, too. As the trailer notes, the laughs are MONSTERous!
Yeti another abominable DreamWorks cartoon?
Yeti another abominable DreamWorks cartoon?
Heavy entertainment from Sydney Pollack. It spends so much time lining up its journalistic-ethics issues that it is stymied as a romantic thriller, and at the same time, or at a different time, its romantic-thriller obligations sidetrack and dilute the issues. The basic situation here is not hard to imagine …
Single-handedly, William Hurt damn near ruins the movie. Always a strange, always a mannered, always a tormented actor, he would appear here to be making a concerted effort to find out how close he can get to being the World's Worst Actor without sacrificing the good opinion of his fans …
The titular character's place in the scheme of things is an interesting one: a lead character doomed to live in the shadow of a supporting character; more exactly, an impoverished young pianist selected as accompanist, and "maybe also artistic advisor," to an illustrious Russian diva in Nazi-occupied France. Besides accompanist, …
They had me at Uncle Fester’s nipples. And kudos to Nick Kroll for restoring Jackie Coogan’s insensitive lisp to the character! Much closer in spirit to Charles Addams’ ghoulishly byzantine etchings (Lurch was indeed an escapee from a home for the criminally insane) and the '60s sitcom it spawned than …
America fell in love with Uncle Fester’s nipples. Why else would a topless Fester be there to greet audiences at the outset, the first big guffaw in a rapidly narrowing field of laughs? The press release promised “many new kooky characters” before asking “What could possibly go wrong?” New kooky …