Yeah, we’ve seen it before: single, self-centered, career-minded woman acquires, through generally wacky means, somebody else’s sassy kid. Adult and child initially butt heads, but eventually help each other grow emotionally. When this premise is done with no thought, you get something like Bogus with Whoopi Goldberg and Haley Joel Osment. When it’s done right, […]
Movie Reviews
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The empire strikes first, again
Although it originates in a novel published a hundred years ago and has been translated to the cinema several times, most memorably in Zoltan Korda’s brilliant 1939 adaptation, the new version of The Four Feathers seems surprisingly — and, no doubt, accidentally — apposite at this moment in the 21st century. A motion picture in […]
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More dispatches from Toronto
Let us pick up where we left off last week at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival, which came to a close September 14. As with last week’s round-up, release dates, where available, appear in parentheses. Day Five (Fractured Family Tales) A Leave It To Beaver feel these films had not. Moonlight Mile (November 4) […]
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Not your mother’s Mork
The small, unusual new movie One Hour Photo provides its star, Robin Williams, who’s awfully busy these days, with yet another opportunity to play against type, personality, and history. At virtually the same time that his one-man Broadway show, which consists of his patented brand of wildly improvisational stand-up comedy, plays on HBO; and very […]
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A Greek tragedy of a cop flick
As the new Robert De Niro film demonstrates, even so ostensibly simple and relatively ancient a form (at least for the cinema) as the cop flick, even in the blockbuster blossom time, possesses the potential to be more than mysteries, manhunts, and shootouts. Based on a true story, City by the Sea examines not only […]
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Dispatches from Toronto
The 27thToronto International Film Festival, which continues to unspool even as you read this, is many things to many people. For some, it’s an early indicator of which upcoming films might be Oscar contenders (five of the last six winners of the People’s Choice Award for the audience’s favorite film have gone on to nab […]
Posted inMovies
Dispatches from Toronto
The 27thToronto International Film Festival, which continues to unspool even as you read this, is many things to many people. For some, it’s an early indicator of which upcoming films might be Oscar contenders (five of the last six winners of the People’s Choice Award for the audience’s favorite film have gone on to nab […]
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Shaking up our expectations
Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, which screens this Friday at the Dryden Theatre, is, at least at its foundation, remarkably similar to his critically acclaimed film The Eel. Both movies deal with a middle-aged, white-collar office drone who leaves a big city life to take up with a bunch of rural kooks […]
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When art is more real than life
That flashy, fabulous, and complicated entity familiarly known as Hollywood occupies so large and so important an area of the American cultural landscape that it provides a readily recognizable source of satire — it’s easy to make fun of the absurdity and exaggeration of the film industry, and nobody ever misses the joke. In addition, […]
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Southern comfort for film lovers
If the cinema, especially in the form of the summer spectacular, can transport us to the farthest boundaries of the universe and across the seas of time, it can also now and then traverse the shorter but more perilous expanses of the mind, explore the darker and more complicated territory of the human heart. […]
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LaBute disappoints, but ‘Sara’ meets expectations
Neil LaBute must have been tuning in to a lot of daytime television over the last couple of years, because I have to assume that anyone who has undergone this kind of career makeover must have been watching dogs get turned into beauty queens on Maury Povich on at least a semi-regular basis. The […]
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The Superman that we deserve
It surely suggests something about the state of the culture
when two of the biggest hits of the summer, accompanied by enormous quantities
of the usual hoopla and hype, playing practically around the clock in a theater
near everyone, descend in some twisted way from the James Bond novels and
films.
