Awkward and long-winded translation of the 1961 Disney animated feature (and anti-furrier fable) into live-action. The dogs are adorable, even eloquent, but hardly as obedient as their cartoon forebears; and Glenn Close's dognapping offenses seem mild next to her overacting. With Jeff Daniels and Joely Richardson; directed by Stephen Herek.
Time-travel brain-twister credited as "inspired [but not very] by the film La Jetée -- the 1962 experimental short composed exclusively of still shots, save one. There are some provocative or at least irksome notions in the script by David and Janet Peoples (Mr. and Mrs.), chief among them the implicit …
Unadventurous wilderness adventure about an uprooted Chicago Cubs fan and his younger sister who, escorted by a baby polar bear dubbed "Cubby," search the Alaskan mountains for their father, teetering helplessly on a precipice in his downed plane. (Yes, just to round out the "cub" motif, a Piper Cub.) Everything …
Small-scale and stagy thriller about a standoff that results when ATF agents, tailing a Canadian gunrunner at the wheel of a stolen car, get thrown off the scent and pick up the wrong car, but still a hot car, occupied by three penny-ante criminals (Matt Dillon, Gary Sinise, William Fichtner) …
Proficient "reading" of an early Mamet play with three speaking parts, an oblique examination of the pettiness of petty crooks. Flavorful; salty; but dry, very dry. With Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Franz, and Sean Nelson; directed by Michael Corrente.
Wonders and terrors of girlhood: a new house (with convenient eavesdropping access to the grownups' bedroom); an unbalanced mother; a sleepwalking neighbor; an imagined angel in the basement; babies; boys; and so on. The feature-film debut of writer-director Rebecca Miller, daughter of the Death of a Salesman man, is quiet …
Nutters in love -- in a phone booth, in a back alley, in a rainstorm, in candlelight, etc. But the world is against them -- these two heavily medicated innocents who follow the counsel of their guardian angel, Astral, communicating to them through the mystery phrases on the Australian Wheel …
The class divisions and emotional repressions -- meat and potatoes -- of Victorian England. The aggressively modern perspective (A.S. Byatt original novella, full frontal nudity of both sexes, and the major innovation of the movie: punctuation marks -- periods -- after each of the opening credits) knocks some of the …
Not especially imaginative documentary: the standard salad of interviews, prosaic narration (Kenneth Branagh), and photographic records. Yet we realize from the age of the interviewees how near we are to the end of the living memory of these events, and the story gets told in considerable detail, and the only …
Briskly efficient, blithely superficial visitors-from-space thriller. The thrills, as they may rationally be called, are widely varied in kind and degree: the momentary frisson upon finding a dead ringer in Mexico of the bad guy in Los Angeles; the well-sustained bout of heebie-jeebies in a hotel room swarming with scorpions; …
Unutterably tedious comic proposition to do with a Wall Street hoax in which a female financial wiz, in order to get her independent investment firm over the hump and off the ground, invents a fictitious male partner -- one Robert Cutty, whose surname is stolen off a bottle of Scotch …
Pick your Uncle Vanya: (a) Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street; (b) Michael Blakemore's Country Life; and now (c) Anthony Hopkins's August — all within the space of a couple of years. (An authentic Russian locale is not an option. ) This present version, transplanted to Hopkins's native Wales, has …
Casablanca re-located in the free city of Steel Harbor during the Second American Civil War, 2017 A.D. Rick's Cafe Americain has been renamed and refurbished as the Hammerhead, and the proprietor -- the eponymous heroine of the Dark Horse comic book -- is resolutely "neutral," until an ex-lover turns up …
The short life and big splash of the Haitian-born artist, Warhol satellite, and drug addict Jean-Michel Basquiat (played with Sabu-like gentleness and innocence by Jeffrey Wright), as commemorated by his fellow artist, his friend, and first-time filmmaker Julian Schnabel. This voice of authority, for all its contentment with cliché, conveys …