Reviews
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B+ |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
The film’s central conceit involves an unexpected culinary
snag of anxiety-nightmare proportions mere hours before April’s
family is to arrive, which forces April to appeal for help to her
hitherto unknown neighbors, the previously anonymous faces in the
hallways of her apartment building. It’s an updated version of
the Pilgrims and the Indians — a point the film drives home just
a bit too cutely as April tries to explain the meaning of
Thanksgiving to a large Asian family: "There came a day when they
knew they needed each other, when they knew they couldn’t do it
alone."
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
A worthy successor to the early classics
Snow White and
Pinocchio,
Sleeping Beauty is the one great fairy-tale adaptation of Disney’s post-war period, outshining
Cinderella and unrivaled until 1991’s Best-Picture candidate
Beauty and the Beast.
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A+ |
**** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
The story is the classic Robin Hood tale, and it’s all here:
the fateful shooting of the King’s deer; Robin’s ignominious
duckings upon his first meetings with Little John (Alan Hale) and
Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette); Robin’s penchant for entertaining
wealthy victims in high Sherwood style before relieving them of
their gold; the trap archery contest which a disguised Robin wins
by splitting his opponent’s arrow; the return of Richard (Ian
Hunter) from the Crusades disguised in monk’s attire.
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A |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Don Q Son of Zorro, named one of the year’s ten best films by
The New York Times, actually outdoes its predecessor, with a stronger and more sophisticated plot, better pacing, more interesting and complex characterizations, grander production values and set design, and more consistent action.
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A- |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Fairbanks’s astonishing acrobatics remain dazzling today, and
the climactic battle includes some great underwater footage of an
aquatic assault on the pirates. This film includes Fairbanks’
most famous and widely copied stunt, riding down a sail on the
edge of a knife; but my favorite is the scene in which he cuts
loose the corner of a billowing sail and then holds on as the
wind carries him up off the deck of the ship and high into the
rigging.
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C |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Take Two: The genial, blandly amusing
tale celebrates the bond between man and dog, and occasional
mildly crude humor is limited to flatulence jokes and the like.
Kids won’t notice, but attentive parents will be irked that the
filmmakers saw fit to insert fleeting depictions of an apparent
homosexual couple in the supporting cast.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
You haven’t seen Zorro until you’ve seen Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as Zorro in the 1920 silent swashbuckling classic.
Read More >
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Powers can’t match the original Zorro’s astonishing acrobatics and doesn’t try — but the rousing climactic duel against Basil Rathbone’s villainous Captain Esteban, one of the best swordfights ever filmed at that time, almost makes up for it.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Silent action king Douglas Fairbanks Sr. is
the most exuberantly athletic of Robin Hoods, for sheer
physicality perhaps outdoing even
Errol Flynn’s definitive
performance.
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A+ |
**** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
As a first introduction to silent film, I would pick
The Kid Brother over the best of Chaplin (
Modern Times,
City Lights) or Keaton (
The General,
Steamboat Bill, Jr.) every time.
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A |
**** |
-1|
Teens & Up
The dialogue is hard-boiled and crackles with wit, the plot is fast-paced and nearly impenetrable, and Humphrey Bogart is coolly unflappable in Howard Hawkes’s stylish
noir classic
The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler novel.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
A haunting, harrowing war movie, an emotionally devastating character study, and an extraordinarily restrained example of
animé or Japanese animation,
Grave of the Fireflies is a unique and unforgettable masterpiece.
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A- |
*** |
+3-2|
Teens & Up
Like
The Mask of Zorro,
Monte Cristo balances its anachronistic sensibilities and over-the-top set pieces with genuine emotion and a real moral dimension — even, in
Monte Cristo, a spiritual dimension. This is an action movie that’s also a morality play, a tale of injustice and vengeance that actually reckons on God, faith, and divine justice.
Read More >
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
From nonagenarian writer-director Manoel de Oliveira, who’s
been making movies for over seven decades, comes a sad,
thoughtful character study of an aging French actor named Gilbert
Valence (Michel Piccoli). On stage, in productions of Ionesco’s
Exit the King and Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
Valence gives impressive readings of the dramatic death-speeches
of aged protagonists; but his own words in a key moment of
frailty and finality, though equally haunting, are much more
prosaic and anticlimactic.
Read More >
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up
The screenplay, well adapted by Robert Bolt from his own stage play, is fiercely intelligent, deeply affecting, resonant with verbal beauty and grace. Scofield, who for years starred in the stage play before making the film, gives an effortlessly rich and layered performance as Sir Thomas More, saint and martyr, the man whose determined silence spoke more forcefully than words, and who then spoke even more forcefully by breaking it.
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B- |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Signs has the
heart that was lacking in
Unbreakable, but stumbles badly
in its treatment of the paranormal, in this case the world of
"X-Files" / "Twilight Zone"
sci-fi. Glaring
practical problems increasingly sap the movie’s plausibility,
until eventually suspension of disbelief becomes possible only by
not thinking about it.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Where other super-hero movies, like James Bond movies, take place in a static universe in which nothing really changes and the essential mythology remains the same,
X2 is set in a world in flux. The plot is part of an ongoing story-arc reaching back to
X-Men and building toward a future
X3.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
She’s fleeing from her concerned father (Walter Connolly) and
returning to the shiftless beau (Jameson Thomas) she married in a
civil ceremony to spite her father (who had her whisked away from
the service, so it’s not final legally or sacramentally).
Read More >
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The prologue, with its storybook-like, slightly arch voiceover narration finely read by Audrey Hepburn, suggests a charming fairy tale with a satiric subtext. And, indeed,
Sabrina, Billy Wilder’s delightful romantic comedy starring Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden, is a sort of Cinderella story, with a chauffeur’s daughter who is transformed into the belle of the ball and dances with the prince — except that the "prince" is, if not a beast, at least a shallow cad, while the real love interest is almost more a frog than a prince.
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B |
*** |
+2-1|
Kids & Up*
Scenes of silent, unstructured Quaker meetings are contrasted
without comment or judgment to the boisterous singing of the
local Methodist church, but — despite Eliza’s best efforts — the
film is largely an account of the compromises the Birdwells are
and aren’t willing to make. Their principles are repeatedly put
to the test, at the local fair, on the Sunday morning ride to the
meeting house as a smug neighbor blows past Jess’s slow horse
every week, and so on. One of the best vignettes concerns an
impasse between Jess and Eliza over the shocking purchase of an
organ, and the delightful way the conflict is finally
resolved.
Read More >
A+ |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
The zaniest, most delightful, most romantic screwball comedy of them all,
Bringing Up Baby features Katherine Hepburn at her effervescent best and Cary Grant in a marvelous performance combining stuffiness and injured dignity with his usual debonair charm.
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B |
*** |
+1-1|
Kids & Up*
In the end, though,
Secondhand Lions is a pleasant and entertaining film that’s neither as demanding nor as satisfying as the superior
Holes. The setup promises more early conflict than the first act delivers, and the story-arc doesn’t give the protagonist enough to do. Beyond that, the film gestures at moral lessons it never quite fleshes out or illustrates, and what ought to have been a key plot point is relegated to a tacked-on coda, depriving it of the crucial significance it should have had.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Yet where Hepburn’s character was merely flighty, Judy Maxwell
exists, like the Cat in the Hat and Bugs Bunny (note the title
line and the carrots she munches in one scene), in the mode of
the Trickster archetype, with inscrutable motives, capricious
behavior, and almost preternatural abilities, capable of
whimsically making Bannister’s life a living nightmare — or
putting things to rights again at a moment’s notice.
Read More >
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Holes manages that rare trick of faithfully evoking what was special about the book without becoming slavish or by-the-numbers. Davis captures the book’s blend of coming-of-age realism, tongue-in-cheek grotesquerie, fantasy, and adventure, and capably navigates the plot’s multiple timelines and settlings.
Read More >
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Unsurprisingly, the film is true to its theatrical roots: low-key, set mostly within the confines of an upper West Side apartment, centered on the conversation between the fire captain and the writer. In keeping with the minimal production values of the stage play, the film was shot in nine days on a limited budget. Dramatic 9/11 footage, flashbacks of the missing firefighters, even a romance between Nick and Joan were all proposed by Hollywood producers, but the filmmakers rightly sensed that anything like this would have been disastrous.
Read More >
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
When
his supply of meds unexpectedly dries up, Roy predictably
disintegrates, much to Frank’s concern. Soon, though, Roy is seeing a
psychiatrist (Bruce Altman, Changing Lanes),
who not only provides the medication he needs, but gets him talking and
thinking about his life — in particular the woman who walked out on him
fourteen years ago, and whether or not she was pregnant at the time.
Read More >
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Some thought and research has clearly gone into the anatomical
itinerary of the microbe-sized crew, which includes Stephen Boyd,
Raquel Welch, and Donald Pleasence. The Cold-War premise involves
an assassination attempt against a top scientist defecting from
the "other side," leaving him with an inoperable brain injury
that only the bionauts can access and treat. There’s also the
requisite threat of a traitor among the ship’s crew, and a brief
bit of nonsense about whether or not to allow the head surgeon’s
female assistant (Welch) on the mission.
Read More >
A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Sullivan wants to address the problem of human suffering, but
his producers argue, rightly so, that he doesn’t know enough
about suffering to make a movie about it. But their attempts to
dissuade him backfire when he decides to go on the road with ten
cents in his pocket in an effort to experience poverty
first-hand.
Read More >
B |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Writer-director Douglas McGrath, who previously adapted and
directed the charming 1996 version of Emma, does a respectable
job of retelling as much of Dickens’ tale as possible in the time
alloted. The casting is generally very good, with Christopher
Plummer as the heartless, well-to-do uncle Ralph Nickleby, Jim
Broadbent as the squinting, leering Squeers of horrific Dotheboys
Hall, and Juliet Stevenson as his equally terrible wife.
Read More >
B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Although the title is taken from the first volume of
Churchill’s history of the war, The Gathering Storm is as
much about Churchill’s personal life as his political trajectory — sometimes to excess, since the political side is usually more
interesting. The warts-and-all portrait includes his loving but
sometimes strained marriage to Clementina (Vanessa Redgrave), his
financial troubles and hard drinking habits, his melancholia or
"black dog," his amateur painting and bricklaying, and his habit
of absent-mindedly losing himself in rehearsing or dictating
speeches while in the bathtub or dressing and undressing.
Read More >
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