Movie Reviews

In Brief: Nominated for six Oscars (winning three), Roman Polanski's Tess (1979) just might be the director's best film — certainly, it's his most beautiful and lyrical. Dedicated to his late wife, Sharon Tate, the film is also possibly his most deeply personal work. Adapted — pretty faithfully — from Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel Tess…

The Story: The Expendables go after one of their own, a nefarious villain long thought dead. The Lowdown: A superbly uneven and overtly uninteresting journey into machismo and stuff blowing up.

In Brief: The next-to-last film in François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) series is also probably the least successful of the lot. It is certainly the slightest and most prone to rambling. The freshness of the "New Wave" was long gone by 1970 when Truffaut made Bed & Board, and the attempt to make this…

In Brief: The most famous of all Sherlock Holmes stories gets the Hammer horror treatment — not inappropriate for a tale about a hound from hell — and the results are very good indeed. In fact, this 1959 film may well be the best version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is certainly the…

The Story: A young man in a supposedly utopian society is chosen to receive the forbidden real history of the world. The Lowdown: Imperfect, but largely well-done and much more provocative — even disturbing — than the usual YA dysfunctional society sci-fi.

The Story: An Irish priest is informed (in the confessional) by a parishioner — a victim of sexual abuse by a long dead priest — that he intends to kill the priest to make a statement about the Church. The Lowdown: Part mystery, part black comedy, part tragedy on the nature of faith and redemption,…

In Brief: If you could uncork a magnum of Mumm Cordon Rouge champagne and turn it into a movie, what you'd get would be a lot like Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932). It is the sparkling quintessence of sophisticated comedy and stylish filmmaking. It's a cheekily and cheerfully amoral tale of archthief Gaston Monescu…

In Brief: Yes, it has its problems — an uninspired director, the look of a typically static Hollywood silent, a botched big scene, a bewildering array of different versions — but The Phantom of the Opera (1925) is still the first large-scale American horror film and retains the power to fascinate. Much of this is…

The Story: Two bored pals take up pretending to be cops and become entangled in taking down a crew of mobsters. The Lowdown: Meandering, joyless tedium in the form of a buddy cop comedy.

In Brief: Though shorn of what preview audiences said was its best sequence (Universal clumsily expanded it to a separate feature called Destiny), Julien Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy (1943) — a follow-up to his 1942 portmanteau film, Tales of Manhattan — still has much to recommend it. The fact that this was made at Universal…

In Brief: Here's a double dose of zombies in a pairing that would likely horrify the makers of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), which is arguably the greatest — and most poetic — zombie movie of all time. Not to take anything away from that film, but, like it or not, Zombies on Broadway…

The Story: A rash of tornadoes and a team of storm chasers converge on a small town. Havoc and devastation follow. The Lowdown: Almost amazing in its ineptitude and wheezy plotting, Into the Storm offers lots of CGI destruction, five cents' worth of dialogue and a lot of dullness between the devastation.

In Brief: A minor — and rarely revived — John Ford film, Four Men and a Prayer (1938) is little more than a studio assignment picture, but it's interesting to see just how personal Ford makes aspects of it. He brings terrific artistry and craftsmanship to what is really a fairly silly globe-trotting romantic mystery…

The Story:  A stage magician sets out to debunk a young woman he's certain is a phony spiritualist and finds more than he imagined. The Lowdown: A sparkling champagne cocktail of a romantic comedy only Woody Allen could make. It may be lightweight — though perhaps not entirely — but it's a little slice of…

The Story: Four mutated turtles and a plucky journalist try to stop an evil scientist and an even eviler samurai. The Lowdown: Bargain-basement Michael Bay pastiche and a lot of sound and fury make for a noisy, not very fun action flick.

In Brief: I confess that the charms of The Red Balloon (1956) wore rather thin for me a very long time ago (and the idea that this 34-minute film won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay has always struck me as ridiculous), but this (mostly) gentle fantasy about a little boy (Pascal Lamorisse, the director's son)…

The Story:  When an Indian family opens a restaurant across the street from a classy French restaurant in a small town in France, trouble — and romance — follows. The Lowdown: A luminous Helen Mirren leads a first-rate cast in this familiar but thoroughly charming and appealing culture-clash, food-centered romantic comedy.

In Brief: This is one of those few Coen Brothers films that I just don't quite get the fuss over. I have no problem with the pitch-black comedy, and I don't especially mind the film's downright cruelty. But the lack of even one character — other than Frances McDormand's Marge (who doesn't enter the film…

The Story: The life and times of James Brown, from extreme poverty to the height of his fame and beyond. The Lowdown: While its non-linear narrative is interesting as filmmaking, it’s not enough to conceal the numerous biopic pitfalls that drag the film down.

In Brief: While it's certainly visually striking and avoids being a standard biopic, Carlos Saura's Goya in Bordeaux comes with its own set of problems. First of all, Saura assumes that the viewer knows a lot more about Spanish painter Francisco Goya than is probable. Second, the film — with its transparent scrim walls —…

The Story: A mismatched — and pretty ragged — quartet of unlikely heroes may be the only chance to save the universe. The Lowdown: A thoroughly engaging, funny, exciting, even charming sci-fi actioner with an appealing cast that makes for excellent summer movie fare.