Reviews
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C+ |
***½ |
+2-3|
Adults*
“You just take your pills and you’ll be fine, really,” Chris (Ellen Burstyn) promises her daughter Regan (Linda Blair), but part of the film’s brief is that pills aren’t the answer to everything, and faith and religion may have answers science doesn’t.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
As deadpan as its affectless protagonist, breakout indie phenomenon
Napoleon Dynamite is like a Roschach test of viewer empathy.
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A- |
**** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
Peter Weir’s
The Truman Show is a remarkably layered achievement: a deceptively simple fairy tale; a hilariously subversive satire of media excess and the erosion of privacy; a sly exploration of the paranoid, solipsistic fear that the world around one is somehow staged for one’s benefit and everyone else is in on it; and finally an elegant parable about truth and happiness with evocative religious resonances.
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A- |
***½ |
+3|
Kids & Up*
Beautiful black-and-white cinematography, startling performances, and harrowing physicality make
The Miracle Worker an extraordinary experience.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
The Night of the Hunter pits two that are pure in heart, two of the little children to whom the Lord says belongs the kingdom of heaven, against one who is a false prophet, a ravening wolf in sheep’s clothing.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Kids & Up*
At nearly 2½ hours long, the 1925 version is still an hour shorter than the 1959 version, yet the story is essentially the same, and the scale similarly impressive.
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B+ |
*** |
+3|
Kids & Up
In 2003, Charlton Heston reprised his greatest role, if in voice only, in an animated made-for-TV version of
Ben-Hur from the director and producers of the animated “Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible” series.
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B |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
A line in the trailer for
The Exorcism of Emily Rose, felicitously cut from the final film, observes that “There’s no pill for the devil.” More to the point, there’s no diagnostic test or scan for him, either.
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B- |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Less than a month after Fox’s dumb, trashy
Fantastic Four somehow passed itself off as a family-friendly superhero comedy comes Disney’s
Sky High, a film that actually fits the bill.
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B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
Just Like Heaven is the first Hollywood film since
Return to Me that I would put in the same league as that earlier film, and that’s saying something.
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The Search for Spock may be the unappreciated middle child of the
Trek franchise, but it’s still one of better and more indispensable episodes.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The original
Trek crew’s real last hurrah,
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is a rousing sendoff for Kirk, Spock, and Bones, and a fitting transition from the original series’ Cold-War milieu to the
Next-Generation age of engagement.
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A |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
With its time-traveling setting in the familiar milieu of the mid-1980s and its crowd-pleasing celebration of whales and conservationism,
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the most successful and widely appealing of the
Star Trek films, and also the most idiosyncratic.
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A |
**** |
-1|
Teens & Up
One of the strongest and most popular entries in the
Star Trek film franchise,
The Wrath of Khan has everything you could ask for in a good sci‑fi action-adventure film: sympathetic, well-drawn heroes, a terrific villain (Ricardo Montalban as Khan), exciting outer-space showdowns, sci‑fi wow factor (the Genesis effect), and a touch of reflective depth (the Enterprise crew finally faces up to age and mortality, and questions about the wisdom and consequences of playing God are hinted at).
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B+ |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up*
Compared to the theatrically released
Hotel Rwanda,
Sometimes in April is grimmer, less focused, and more
uncompromising. Both films focus on a connected, successful Hutu
family man with a Tutsi wife and a number of children, but this
man’s story, in which the past of 1994 and the present are
intercut, is more ambiguous and tragic.
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A- |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) The main cast is no longer trapped in amber — never changing their relationships, never getting promoted, never leaving the Enterprise. They’ve become unstuck. It’s a sign of things to come.
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B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
The film simplifies the original story in many ways, reducing
the book’s four sons to three and the half-dozen or so homesteads
and plantations the Robinsons build to the one famous treehouse.
Wyss’s fantastical menagerie, which included penguins, kangaroos,
flamingos, lions, and boa constrictors living side by side, is
only slightly restrained by a century and a half of scientific
advancement, and the book’s strong element of religious devotion
and moral discipline is largely reduced in the film to a moment
of silent prayer on the beach.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Echoes of Abraham and Isaac, the Gospel parables about fathers
and pairs of sons, and the Second Coming run through a stark tale
of an inscrutable, harsh stranger whose unexpected reappearance
in the lives of his two sons is as unexplained as his
disappearance so many years earlier. Our first glimpse of the
nameless father (Vladimir Garin) lying in bed overtly recalls
Mantegna’s Lamentation Over the Dead
Christ — yet this man is anything but Christlike in his
treatment of his newfound sons.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Downbeat, intelligent, and compelling, the film is brilliantly
constructed and acted, bringing lucid, forceful moral
argumentation as well as emotional sympathy to both sides without
tipping its hand until the powerful climax. Tribunal justice Dan
Hayward (Spencer Tracy) is the ideal foil for the film’s
rhetoric: a self-deprecating, folksy American circuit court judge
with no ax to grind and a winsome appreciation for his own
obscurity, knowing he’s sitting in judgment of defendants no one
else wanted to judge.
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B+ |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
More, it is a tale of fellowship undone not first of all by
the treachery of enemies but by the frailty of human nature
itself, even of the most trusted intimates. Perhaps that’s partly
why classic Hollywood forayed more successfully into Sherwood
Forest and Zorro’s California than Camelot.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up
A stark, unsettling vision of human cruelty,
folly, and destructive behavior, leavened by an icon of innocent
suffering,
Au Hasard Balthazar may be Robert Bresson’s
most poetic, haunting, personal work — the culmination of the
filmmaker’s style and concerns, the most "Bressonian" of
films.
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C |
**½ |
+1-2|
Adults
The Island is the closest thing so far to a good Michael Bay film. Damning with faint praise, yes — but bear in mind that most of Bay’s filmography to date (
Armageddon,
Pearl Harbor,
Bad Boys and
Bad Boys II) deserves to be damned with loud damns. So let me repeat:
The Island is Bay’s best film to date, and Bay’s best effort to date at a meaningful, thoughtful film.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
Along with
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and
The 10,000 Fingers of Dr. T,
Willy Wonka illustrates the distinct possibility of telling a fairy-tale like story about a child transported to a fantasy wonderland, with brightly costumed little people singing and dancing and strange dangers to be negotiated, yet winding up with a film that is more a fond tribute to "pure imagination" than a triumph of it.
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B- |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
And no one but Burton could possibly have thought it would be
a good idea to give candymaker extraordinaire Willy Wonka (Depp)
unresolved issues from childhood stemming from a traumatic
relationship with his dentist father (Christopher Lee!), leaving
Wonka unable to say the words "family" or "parents," and subject
to disorienting childhood flashbacks. When the book’s climax and
denouement have played out, and the credits should be rolling any
minute now, and the film suddenly invents additional obstacles to
delay the hero’s reward, then cuts to a scene with the other most
prominent character on a psychiatrist’s couch, can there be any
doubt that the film has gone off the rails?
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D- |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
How bad is
Fantastic Four? So bad that in desperation execs have resorted to trying to spin it as a "funny family action film," as one studio rep put it. It’s the
Kangaroo Jack strategy: When your dumb, trashy film clearly isn’t good enough for adolescents, let alone adults, reposition it as a kiddie flick. It’s an insult to family audiences. Our kids deserve better than Hollywood’s garbage.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The Incredibles is exhilarating
entertainment with unexpected depths. It’s a bold, bright, funny
and furious superhero cartoon that dares to take sly jabs at the
culture of entitlement, from the shallow doctrine of self-esteem
that affirms everybody, encouraging mediocrity and penalizing
excellence, to the litigation culture that demands recompense for
everyone if anything ever happens, to the detriment of the
genuinely needy.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Adults
Individual set pieces are riveting, and one seldom doubts that if alien tripods were actually wreaking havoc on the Earth, this is indeed very much what it would be like. Afterwards, though, one is left with little more than ashes.
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
It’s tempting to call
Batman Begins the
Citizen Kane of super-hero
movies; at any rate, it’s the closest thing so far.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up*
But then Braddock cracks a grin and admits, “I won,” and Mae rushes into his arms, and we realize the real significance of Jimmy’s sad-sack look and Mae’s silence. No typical sports-movie marriage, this. For Braddock, a devoted husband and father and an all-around righteous guy, there’s never any doubt that family is his first and last priority; boxing is merely a means of putting bread on the table.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up*
The Ninth Day digs beyond rote charges of ecclesiastical complicity and counter-arguments to explore various levels of resistance and protest — and their consequences.
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