Movie Reviews

In Brief: If you don’t know Jean Renoir, it’s time you did, and Grand Illusion (1937) is the best place to start. Generally considered an anti-war film — and it is one — Grand Illusion is really too many things to be neatly pigeonholed by genre. It’s a World War I story — essentially a story about French prisoners…

The Story: Dealing with the stress of an angsty teen, Toula must help her parents throw their own big, fat Greek wedding when they realize their wedding certificate was never signed. The Lowdown: About all this genteel comedy has going for it is its general good-naturedness, with the rest of the film a dull mishmash…

The Story: A simple story about Batman being on the outs with Superman that's overly complicated in order to bring in other characters and the requisite mayhem and property damage. The Lowdown: It's neither as bad as it's been painted nor as good as one might hope. It takes itself too seriously and so isn't…

In Brief: In a fit of culture, the Warner Bros. decided to go full-on prestige in 1935 by hiring in one of the most controversial — but exceedingly famous — interpreters of Shakespeare to bring his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the screen with the idea of using it as an artistic showcase for…

In Brief: The name Deanna Durbin may not be immediately familiar to today’s audiences, but she practically carried Universal Pictures single-handedly between 1936 and 1941 — and she remained one of their biggest stars until she retired from movies in 1949. She had an operatic voice and was that rarest of things: a completely appealing…

The Story: Traveling through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, our heroine Tris discovers more about the dystopian world she lives in. The Lowdown: More self-serious, noisy, sci-fi nonsense, only with no proper ending and more big-name cast members wasted.

The Story: An older woman falls in love with a co-worker who is at least half her age. The Lowdown: A touching, charming, often funny (with an undercurrent of pain) film that showcases its star, and indeed the whole cast. A must-see? Close enough as makes no difference.

The Story: A young girl with an incurable gastro-intestinal disorder inexplicably recovers after falling into a tree. The Lowdown: You can spare yourself two hours of Jennifer Garner grimacing by watching the trailer, as it covers nearly every significant story beat.

In Brief: In what is perhaps the greatest line of ballyhoo ever penned, the trailer for Erle C. Kenton’s The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) assures us, “Here is drama completely strange!” Unfortunately, there’s not much all that strange about it — unless you’ve never seen a Frankenstein movie. This is the movie where the once-great series dropped…

In Brief: What once made Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965) a favorite of university film classes — its 45-minute running time being perfect for one class session — has since conspired to make it one of the filmmaker’s more obscure works. After all, 45 minutes is an awkward fit for just about anything other than a classroom.…

In Brief: Having tackled Macbeth in 1957 with Throne of Blood, the great Akira Kurosawa took on King Lear toward the end of his life with Ran (1985) — and the results were astonishing. Though his eyesight was failing, he managed to create one of his most visually stunning films with the help of his…

In Brief: Robert Siodmak’s Son of Dracula (1943) is a film that, but for one thing, would be one of the great horror pictures. Unfortunately, that one thing is a badly miscast lead, Lon Chaney Jr., as Dracula (or, if you prefer, his son) — and that’s a pretty big problem. (For kicks, you can always start a rip-roaring…

The Story: A pill-popping advertising executive gets involved with a new form of "virtual reality" in the course of his work. The Lowdown: You'd be hard pressed to find a better looking movie and a more interesting premise. But, dramatically, the film suffers from unlikable characters and a certain smugness.

The Story: Intercut parallel journeys through the Amazon by two ethnographers in different eras. The Lowdown: Rich and strange mystical film that is filled to the bursting point with dream images and bizarre characters. It's always a pleasure to look at and is endlessly intriguing, but it can't quite pull off its ending.

The Story: A young woman awakes from an accident to find herself in an underground bunker where she's told the world above has fallen prey to some kind of cataclysm that makes it uninhabitable. The Lowdown: This sort-of, kissing-cousin, pseudo-sequel to Cloverfield is really two movies joined together with very visible seams. It's not awful,…

The Story: An idiot soccer hooligan ends up teaming with his spy brother to save the world (more or less). The Lowdown: A collection of raunchy, vile, gross, disgusting, offensive gags — many of which are actually offensive and funny at the same time — packed into a spy-spoof that is not recommended for the…

In Brief: I first saw Fred Niblo’s 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur 44 years ago — a battered, 16 mm bootleg print courtesy of film professor "Knocky" Parker at the University of South Florida. The film was projected at silent speed (an error that made it last for what seemed like three days), looking very scratchy, with obviously missing…

The Story: A playboy is coerced into overcoming his fear of romantic entanglement through the incessant nagging of his family and friends, and with the help of that special someone who seems to be his perfect match: A woman who is just as sociopathic, bland and narcissistic as he is. The Lowdown: The only perfect…

The Story: A bronze medalist Olympic gymnast — and longtime local celebrity — is forced by circumstances to train a more-promising young contender. The Lowdown: When the film gets past its often noxious first 40 minutes and becomes a more appealing story, this raunchy rom-com comes into its own. But those first 40 minutes can…

The Story: The story of Jesus’ childhood. The Lowdown: Slow, long, plodding, self-serious, humorless religious tale that adds little to the story of Jesus and less to cinema as a whole.

In Brief: One of the most controversial and sexually frank movies of its decade, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) is a classic example of a film that’s not for everyone. Fully earning its NC-17 rating, its themes are adult and the use of sex and nudity is pretty unflinching, and should be borne in mind. The story concerns a…