Movie Reviews

The Story: Domestic drama centering on the complex issues surrounding a woman's divorce and purported remarriage. The Lowdown: Just exactly how The Past missed a Best Foreign Language Oscar nod is a mystery of some note. This is a powerful and compelling drama — structured as a mystery — that's on the short list of…

The Story: Dire doings and romantic hijinks at a school for vampires. The Lowdown: Muddled and not worth bothering to figure out, it's simply another piece of the winter wasteland — and the groundhog predicted six more weeks of this.

In Brief: It's got Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. It was directed by Stanley Donen. It's filled with Gershwin songs (augmented with a few others by lesser lights). What's not to love about the 1957 film, Funny Face? Well, pretty much nothing. It's colorful, glossy, tuneful, funny, romantic and it moves like lightning. Some carp…

The Story: An uninteresting Lego figure — living in a Lego world — is chosen to fulfill a prophecy that will free his people. The Lowdown: A fun, often cute (and eventually sappy) movie that’s enjoyable but disposable.

The Story: Fact-based story of the men who rescued stolen art treasures from the Nazis in WWII. The Lowdown: Yes, it should have been great and it's only pretty good, but it's not the disaster many have painted. It's solidly made and individual sequences are excellent, even if the whole doesn't work so well.

In Brief: SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELLED. World Cinema is bringing back Peter Weir's occult thriller The Last Wave (1977). This is the film that brought Weir to even greater international attention than his Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) had. Seen today, it's an imperfect affair that benefits from its intensely creepy atmosphere, but it suffers…

In Brief: The Hendersonville Film Society is showing the restored (complete) 1963 epic Cleopatra as its director intended — as two separate films. Part One details Cleopatra's (Elizabeth Taylor) romantic and political antics with Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison), and Part Two does the same with her and Marc Antony (Richard Burton). It does make for…

The Story: When hardcore player Jason falls in love he has trouble coming to terms with the changes in his worldview. The Lowdown: Extremely predictable, flat and lame, but it looks nice and has a few good moments — too few to make the difference.

In Brief: Yes, the third film in Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) trilogy, Britannia Hospital (1982), is the least successful of the three. It's flawed and uneven. It lacks the precision of If... (1968) and the quirky playfulness and non-stop creativity of O Lucky Man! Even so, this bitterly angry black comedy about a…

The Story: Compilations of the Oscar-nominated live action and animated shorts for 2014. This is being done as two separate showings with separate admissions. The Lowdown: While nothing is quite up to last year's live action winner, these are two solid collections of films — and your chance to be a truly knowledgeable Oscar-watcher.

In Brief: After Connie and Carla (2004) failed to duplicate the freakish $244 million success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) — by about $236 million — Nia Vardolos more or less withdrew from the scene, only to return with My Life in Ruins (2009). Apparently, she thought it was closer in tone to…

In Brief: Nick Nolte (yes, Nick Nolte) gives a terrific performance as a heroin-addicted gambler with a gift for gab in Neil Jordan's wrongly overlooked remake — a complete re-imagining, really — of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 Bob le Flambeur, The Good Thief (2002). In Jordan's hands, the story becomes an even twistier neon-noir thriller about…

The Story: A depressed mother and her son take in an escaped prisoner over Labor Day weekend in 1987. The Lowdown: An overall well-crafted film with quick flashes of something more that’s too stilted, unrealistic and treacly to work.

In Brief: This minor gem from Britain's Hammer Films, though heavily promoted by images of someone in a creepy mask, is more a suspense thriller that turns horror film macabre than an outright horror film. Despite the official billing, a young (pre-scar) Oliver Reed stars in Paranoiac (1963) as a hard-drinking, deeply disturbed man who…

The Story: A really buff Frankenstein monster finds himself caught in the middle of a war between good (gargoyles) and evil (demons). The Lowdown: Utterly preposterous and by no means good, it nonetheless moves at a decent pace, but there is nothing I can recommend.

In Brief: A bright screenplay from Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, sophisticated direction by the always-underrated Mitchell Leisen, a dream cast and that special luster that only vintage Paramount pictures provide come together in Midnight (1939). It's a nearly perfect soufflé of a movie about a broke chorus girl (Claudette Colobert), a helpful Parisian taxi…

In Brief: Douglas Fairbanks was determined to make the biggest and most spectacular fantasy adventure ever seen with The Thief of Bagdad (1924). With the help of director Raoul Walsh and designer William Cameron Menzies, that's exactly what he did. Sure, the 90-year-old effects aren't quite as dazzling now as they were then (though they're…

The Story: An aging trendsetter, journalist and writer takes a look at his life and the special world he lives in. The Lowdown: A great bursting Roman candle (literally) of a film, it's a grand cinematic whirlwind that's in touch with the past of Italian film but isn't embalmed by it. There is nothing like…

In Brief: It may not quite be the "X-rated action" that the film itself claims, but John Woo's Hard Boiled is certainly two solid hours of almost nonstop, hard, R-rated action. It's also a bracing reminder of how good John Woo was before he was lured to Hollywood. Yes, it's extremely violent and more than…

In Brief: Immensely silly and seldom-seen old dark house comedy horror from Great Britain that stars two popular Brit comics from the "Carry On" movies — Sid James and Kenneth Connor — as a pair of Laurel and Hardy-like characters out to claim an inheritance. It is perhaps of more interest now for the presence…

The Story: Animated kiddie flick about park animals robbing a nut shop. The Lowdown: Bland and boring, but nice to look at and mostly innocuous. Not worth the bother of sitting through, however.