Reviews
Pages: [1] « 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 » [29]
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
Spellbound, Jeffrey Blitz’s endearing, heartbreaking,
deeply rewarding documentary about eight brainy middle-school
kids competing with nearly 250 other spellers in front of the
ESPN-watching world, is full of such unforgettable moments. Not
just a documentary of a contest, Spellbound is a
behind-the-scenes look at the lives of contestants of various
regional and socioeconomic backgrounds whose only common bond is
a facility with putting words together.
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A+ |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Not only does it terrifically succeed where movies like Mel
Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights miserably fail, The
Court Jester also as merry, high-spirited, and wholesome as
the adventures it parodies, with none of the cynical, anarchic
spirit (or content issues) of the likes of Monty Python and
the Holy Grail.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Not the best or most exciting of comic-book movies to date, but the most thoughtful and arguably one of the most interesting, Ang Lee’s
Hulk offers a new look at Marvel Comics’s green-skinned Jekyll-and-Hyde pulp anti-hero through the director’s poetic, psychologically attuned sensibilities.
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A |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
What
Winged Migration did for birds and
Atlantis did for life under the
sea,
Microcosmos does for the insect world. It’s an
astonishingly up-close and personal look at an infinitesimal
world as alien as anything captured by the Hubble telescope or
the Mars rovers — but also a world of strange fascination and
unexpected beauty.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Despite numerous cinematic adaptations — including Steve
Martin’s cute romantic-comedy update Roxanne — the
definitive Cyrano is probably Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s
boisterous, full-blooded film, with France’s greatest actor,
Gérard Depardieu, making the part forever his own.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Why is
The Philadelphia Story so well known, while the equally unforgettable
Holiday, from the same director, writers, and leads, suffers comparative neglect?
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
The film knows that to a young girl hopelessly in love, this
race is no grandly romantic gesture, but a matter of desperate
necessity. She must, must catch the wagon; he must
have the dumplings. Her future happiness depends upon it; all is
lost if she fails.
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Buster Keaton’s most popular vehicle in his
own day, and said to be Keaton’s favorite of his own films,
The Navigator isn’t as sophisticated and satisfying as his
best work (e.g.,
The General), but it’s still brilliant
slapstick comedy, with a rousing third act and a slam-bang
climax.
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D |
** |
-3|
Adults
"Everything he ever needed to know," blurbs the tagline, "she
learned in prison." More accurately, everything he ever needed to
know, she learned in the ghetto; the larger point is that she has
everything to teach and nothing to learn, and he has everything
to learn and nothing to teach.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Like many Christmas-themed movies, it
offers no insight into the true meaning of Christmas, but it
brims with insight into the human condition — particularly the
condition of boys at Christmastime.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
True to type, Crosby plays nice and Astaire shallow: Jim
(Crosby) loves his dance partner and wants to marry her and
settle down, but Ted (Astaire) wants to dance with her, and
steals her away from Jim. Heartbroken, Jim retires to the
Connecticut farm where he had hoped to settle down, but soon
finds that show business is in his blood, and hits on the novel
idea of turning his farmhouse into a dinner theater that operates
only on holidays.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Oklahoma! was the first of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical collaborations, and it changed the face of musical theater.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Who is right? The issues are complex, and historians and
faithful Catholics disagree (see related article). One
Man’s Hero is sympathetic to the St. Pats and critical of
American "Manifest Destiny" expansionism and
anti-Catholicism.
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B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
With Piglet’s Big Movie, Pooh finally returns to his
roots, bringing three of Milne’s original tales to the screen for
the first time in an anthology-style story. Framed as a series of
flashbacks in a story with Pooh and his friends searching for the
missing Piglet, the movie recalls the tales of Christopher
Robin’s expedition to the North Pole, the house at Pooh Corner,
and the arrival of Kanga and Roo in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Running through all three episodes as well as the framing story
is the film’s unifying theme, little Piglet’s big heart and
heroism.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
(Review by Jimmy Akin) Teacher’s Pet is the story of a boy and
his dog. It’s not the usual boy and his dog story, though. In
this case, the dog wants to be a boy. And in this movie,
he gets his wish.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
James Garner brings a variation on his
"Maverick" persona to this classic satirical Western that, even
more than
Destry Rides
Again, does for Westerns what
The Princess Bride did for
fairy-tale fantasy, at once spoofing and honoring the genre’s
conventions and clichés.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Grant plays Walter Eckland, a boorish, unkempt boozer
corralled into doing plane-spotting duty on an uninhabited South
Pacific island during the second World War. Just when he thinks
his situation can’t get any worse, his world is invaded, not by
the Japanese, but by seven French schoolgirls and their prim
schoolmistress, Catherine Freneau (Lesie Caron). Needless to say,
their presence puts a decided cramp on Eckland’s relaxed
lifestyle, and sparks of more than one sort fly between Freneau
and Eckland as they clash over living arrangements and Eckland’s
drinking.
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B+ |
*** |
+3|
Kids & Up
Smith is determined to move on, but soon agrees to a day’s
work; and proceeds to find himself faced with one task after
another. Exactly how much Mother Maria intends to ask of him — and how much she is able to pay him — are not immediately clear;
nor is the extent to which the language barrier is a hindrance to
her and the extent to which she is hiding behind it.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
This theme of romantically linking an upper-class society girl
and a man beneath her station would become a popular device in
screwball comedies, appealing to Depression audiences both as
escapist entertainment and as satire of the idle rich and
celebration of the hardworking poor.
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A- |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Once the advent of digital video freed filmmakers from the constraints of physical film, it was only a matter of time before someone made the first feature film entirely in one take, without a single edit or cut.
Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov’s experimental art-house meditation on Russia’s cultural heritage and current identity crisis, has the distinction of being that film.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Character design is a mixed bag: Gandalf looks very much
himself, but Bilbo is rather cherubic, and the dwarves are
uninspired. Worse is Gollum, disappointingly bloated and stiff
rather than agile and emaciated, and the dreadfully goblin-like
Wood-Elf King. (On the other hand, the Elf-lord Elrond, with his
distinguished features and strange crown-halo, is far preferable
to Bakshi’s dismally graceless version of the same
character.)
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B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Notwithstanding this and other weaknesses, this Lord of the
Rings is in some respects quite impressive and remains worth
a look, especially for Tolkien fans, and perhaps younger viewers
not quite old enough for Peter Jackson’s more intense adaptation — though even the Bakshi is darker and more intense than most
cartoons. (Younger viewers might also be interested in the
animated Rankin-Bass versions of The
Hobbit and The
Return of the King.)
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C |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up
The film hits the most critical plot points, but is clearly
aimed at the younger set, with little to interest even the most
avid adult Tolkien and/or animation buff. Unfortunately, this
style works even less well here than in
The Hobbit, which
really is a children’s story. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
is a much more adult work, but Rankin-Bass essentially makes a
kid movie out of it. Even so, for kids too young for the Jackson
or even Bakshi versions, the Rankin-Bass cartoons might be just
the ticket.
Read More >
C |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Like Haley Joel Osment in Secondhand Lions wanting to
know the truth about the tales of his uncles’ alleged exploits,
Ed’s son Will (Billy Crudup) wants to know whether his dying
father really was a Big Fish in a small pond, or whether his
father’s tales were just Big Fish stories. Big Fish also
echoes Secondhand Lions by ending with a funeral scene
that provides some answers as Will finally meets certain
individuals from his father’s past.
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D |
**½ |
-2|
Adults*
Now, you can have a sci-fi movie in which Haley Joel Osment
plays a robot. What you can’t do is suddenly bring human-like
robots into the end of a ghost story in which the existence of
that kind of technology hasn’t been established. And you can have
Kevin Spacey claim to be from another planet, but not in the last
reel of what had until then looked like a solidly earthbound
crime thriller.
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C+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Return to Never Land is Peter Pan Lite,
if I can say that without conjuring images of low-fat peanut
butter.
Read More >
A+ |
**** |
+3|
Kids & Up*
“No one is born to be a failure. No one is poor who has friends.” These platitudes, plastered across the packaging of home-video editions of Frank Capra’s evergreen Christmas classic
It’s a Wonderful Life, exemplify the film’s popular but misleading image as sentimental, schmaltzy “Capra-corn.” Yet the film itself is leavened by darker themes and more rigorous morals about self-sacrifice, disappointment, and the fragility of happiness and the American dream.
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B- |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Elves love to tell stories, or so Papa Elf
(Bob Newhart) tells us at the beginning of this elf story. It is
an unusual tale in that it is the other side of all the
changeling stories that have circulated in folklore for
centuries. Instead of being the tale of a fairy raised among
mankind, it is the story of a human raised among elves.
Read More >
A- |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
One of the cinema’s grandest spectacles,
Lawrence of Arabia is at turns exhilarating, devastating, and puzzling as it ponders the mystery of a man who was a mystery to himself.
Read More >
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Director Jacques Perrin and his crew of pilots and
cinematographers spent four years traversing the globe, capturing
unprecedented images of migratory birds in flight and on land.
Shooting from hot-air balloons and ultralight aircraft, the
filmmakers insinuate the camera’s eye so intimately into the
midst of airborne flights of birds that one can almost count the
hairlike barbs on the feathers. Other times, one is staggered by
the sheer number of birds captured in a single shot,
sweeping across the sky like a curtain being drawn or covering an
island to the horizon and the edges of the screen.
Read More >
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