In the sixth of the 11 chapters (plus prologue and epilogue) that make up Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband, we find the 85-year-old Johan (Erland Josephson, Scenes from a Marriage) with his ear pressed close to a stereo speaker listening to the second movement of Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony — a piece of music that frames the […]
Nanny McPhee may not be a great film — it certainly has its share of flaws — and yet it is such a strange brew as to be fascinating even at its worst. Its striking combination of day-glo psychedelic colors and a rich streak of morbidity is enough to keep it afloat most of the […]
Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins make a perfect — if somewhat unorthodox — screen team in this delightful new film from Stephen Frears about the history of London’s legendary Windmill Theatre. Don’t let the historical notion — nor even that dreaded phrase “inspired by true events” — put you off. This is no dry study […]
I never saw the original Big Momma’s House, and I can safely say that the likelihood of my having seen its sequel if I hadn’t been reviewing it is marginally less than the probability of my mounting a Himalayan expedition in search of the yeti. The film follows in the footsteps of Martin Lawrence’s last […]
“Sir, no, sir!” That’s what you should shout if someone tries to convince you that Annapolis is a realistic portrait of the hallowed institution that trains Navy and Marine officers. Heck, it wasn’t even shot at Annapolis — it seems that after the Navy got hold of the script, they withdrew their cooperation and it […]
In most cases, I’ll go back and re-watch the previous film when tackling a sequel. In the case of Underworld Evolution, I contented myself, on the Life-Is-Too-Short principle, with merely looking over my review of Underworld. Doing so mostly reminded me that I’m still awaiting the return of werewolves in trousers — like Lon Chaney […]
This is the odd-film-out in the major works of Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger — rarely spoken of in the same breath with their standard classics, The Life and Death of Col. Blimp, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, yet clearly part of the same creative impetus behind those films. Why? Well, […]
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger — being given a new lease on theatrical life by star Jack Nicholson — is probably more important as a representative of its time than as a film in its own right. Though it played at this past year’s Asheville Film Festival, I missed it owing to a hectic […]
I cannot in good conscience recommend The New World. Still, I have to admit that I admired this film more than a number I have recommended. Calling The New World a noble failure or a grand folly would be the easy way out of explaining my high regard for Terrence Malick’s film on the story […]
Back in 1963, a silly Bob Hope picture by the name of Call Me Bwana offered the concept of Hope as a bogus authority on Africa who was sent by President Kennedy to the innermost recesses of the continent to help discover the location of a spy satellite that came down where it wasn’t meant […]
“Can peace really be acquired without changing the human heart?” asks the narrator of this well-crafted Christian drama. The film’s answer, of course, is that only Christ can accomplish such a miracle, but director Jim Hanon (Beyond the Gates of Splendor documentary) shows that redemption can make for a pretty good adventure tale. Fifty years […]
Idiosyncratic visionaries don’t come any more idiosyncratic or visionary than Werner Herzog — especially when Herzog was teamed up with his madman in residence, Klaus Kinski, as he is here in the first of their six films together. The film is Herzog’s imagining of what happened to a group of men who were sent out […]
After theatrical impresario John Barrymore’s disastrous production of Joan of Arc in Howard Hawks’ 1934 comedy Twentieth Century, Roscoe Karns’ character says of Oscar Jaffe (Barrymore’s character): “Well, he’s gonna end up in the breadline unless he figures out that these dithering horse operas with a lot of people staggering around in foul iron suits […]
The opportunities for study and appreciation of film are truly inexhaustible — witness the fact that until this essential of the Italian Neo-Realist school of filmmaking was scheduled for a special showing, I’d managed to never catch up with it before, despite having watched just about everything of any note or repute that crossed my […]
By turns brilliant and frustrating, Vincent Ward’s Map of the Human Heart (1993) is one of those films that you admire more for what it tries to do than for what it actually accomplishes. The movie is nothing if not ambitious, something that works both for and against it. Ward’s story contains a lot of […]
J.B. Priestley used to be one of the most famous voices in 20th- century English literature. Today, the mention of his name is more apt to result in a blank stare than anything else. His plays are still known, but a quick search of Amazon.com shows only one of his novels, The Magicians, as readily […]
“We do not back down here, ever!” coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas, Sweet Home Alabama) exhorts his players at Western Texas University. His words challenge his young black athletes to cast off their victim mind-set and charge for glory — and establish integration in college basketball. The double-edged story of the greatest upset in NCAA […]
Like a cinematic Roman candle, Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto bursts onto the screen ablaze with more color, more ideas, more nerve, more invention and more heart than just about anything imaginable — reminding us anew that Jordan is quite probably the finest filmmaker working today. He’s certainly the most stylish, but even more, he’s […]
I didn’t buy the guff about Eli Roth being the “savior of horror” when Cabin Fever came out and I’m not buying it now, though Hostel is a much more accomplished piece of work than his debut offering. That said, I’m cognizant of the fact that 2005 was one of the worst years in the […]
Enough already with “revisionist” takes on fairy tales and Shrek wannabes! This independently made CGI-animated film picked up for distribution by the Weinstein brothers doesn’t even look or feel like a real movie — in fact, it resembles nothing so much as the work of a third-year film student convinced he’s done something really fresh […]
Maybe it’s that my expectations were so low that you couldn’t have found them with the aid of a minesweeper, but I didn’t hate this admittedly slipshod and silly offering from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions. Almost all the other critics tell me I’m supposed to, though at least one of these reviewers lost all […]
