Movie Reviews

The Story: A customer-service guru on a business trip meets a timid yet alluring woman in his hotel. The Lowdown: Simple in many ways (at least as far as plot goes) but deep and resounding in its examination of the search for human connection.

In Brief: Prior to Walkabout (1971), Nicolas Roeg had co-directed (with Donald Cammell) only one film, the astonishing Performance, so a good deal was riding on the cinematographer-turned-filmmaker’s second outing. Could Roeg pull off a solo film? Indeed, he could. In so doing, he established himself as a filmmaker with a unique, if not always completely penetrable,…

In Brief: A legacy from that brief period when Paramount was determined to make Tallulah Bankhead into a movie star (they gave up after this one), Marion Gering's Devil and the Deep was also meant to introduce the movie world to Charles Laughton. Back in 1932, it wasn't especially effective at either, but today it plays as deliciously overheated…

The Story: The supposedly true story of the attack on the embassy in Beghazi. The Lowdown: Michael Bay blows up stuff, unleashes massive firepower and concludes not much of anything in this jingoistic mess of a movie.

The Story: Two odd couple cops (and soon to be brothers-in-law) head to Miami to take down a drug kingpin. The Lowdown: A noisy, aimless and cliched rehash of the first in the series.

In Brief: Sisters (1973) is by no means the first Brian De Palma film, though it might fairly be called the first De Palma film as we know them. The theme is, in part, voyeurism — so we're right at home from the onset. The tone is set as much by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) as it…

The Story:  A girl searches for her twin sister in Japan's notorious "Suicide Forest." The Lowdown: Whether or not the Aokigahara Forest prompts people to commit suicide, chances are good that this first release of the new year will put you to sleep.

In Brief: The second of Bela Lugosi's Monogram Nine, Spooks Run Wild, mixes horror with comedy as it finds Lugosi going up against producer Sam Katzman's other major property of the era, The East Side Kids, a slightly cleaned-up version of The Dead End Kids from Sidney Kingsley's play (and film) Dead End. In other words, these…

In Brief: George Stevens' post-WWII films tend to be an acquired taste which I've never really managed to acquire. They're too heavy-handed, too self-conscious, too self-important and, invariably, too long. The first time I saw Shane (1953) was at a kiddie matinee in 1963 or thereabouts. (Our local theater ran a lot of old Paramount and…

In Brief: No, this musical version of The Philadelphia Story is not a great film by any means. Charles Walters' direction is at best workmanlike, at worst pedestrian. It has the air of canned theater in many scenes, along with that typical 1950s overlit look of most MGM musicals. But it does combine the talents of Bing…

The Story: Eight people — all with secrets and hidden motives — are trapped in a cabin in a snowstorm.  The Lowdown: A sprawling, darkly funny Western that's really more of a whodunit than a Western. Violent, bloody, provocative, likely to upset some audiences and one of the best films of the year.

In Brief: Michele Soavi's 1989 film was originally intended to be part of producer and co-writer Dario Argento's loosely connected Demons movies. While it retains elements of those films — especially contagious possessions and trapping the cast in a single location — it is mostly its own beast. And a very curious beast it is. Like most…

In Brief: Yes, Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper), Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur) and Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison) really existed. For that matter, so did a lot of the characters in Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), but nearly every connection to reality ends there — and the film is pretty upfront about it. Right…

The Story: Romance between an older woman and a younger one in the early 1950s. The Lowdown: Beautifully crafted, meticulously detailed, wonderfully performed, yet somehow a little too cool to work quite as well as it should.

The Story: Fact-based tale of survival in the wilderness of 1820s American frontier.  The Lowdown: Technically marvelous, but emotionally it's pretty much a dreary dead end.

In Brief: Reasonably accurate (with a modicum of subtext that's so slight as to be almost nonexistent) account of the early years of composer Robert Schumann (Herbert Groenemeyer) and Clara Wieck (Nasstassja Kinski). Spring Symphony (1983) is the sort of biopic that gives biopics a bad name. It runs no risks and is so intent…