The principal reason to see The Impossible is the herculean performance of Naomi Watts as a real-life wife and mother swept away in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, fighting to hang onto her life and family. In a film directed by the gifted Spanish…
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Bland Hyde Park on the Hudson, about a 1939 weekend sojourn between the FDR, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, doesn’t do much to illuminate Roosevelt and even less to enliven its decidedly slight chapter of history. It wants to be a whimsical comedy…
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Silver Linings Playbook is one of the year’s most emotionally generous movies, a crowd-pleaser of a romantic comedy that also happens to be a gritty family drama about bi-polar disorder. If that sounds like an unlikely combination, writer-director David O. Russell deftly juggles such…
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Bigger is definitely not better in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2, an overblown series finale that jettisons Twilight’s signature love triangle between a vampire, human and werewolf in favor or a cluttered, badly CGI-d vampire showdown the likes of which we’ve seen…
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All the world’s a stage, but in the case of Joe Wright’s new screen adaptation of Anna Karenina, perhaps it shouldn’t be. While wish I could say that Wright’s conceptual audacity in setting his new movie version of Tolstoy’s classic largely inside a decrepit,…
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I made it out of my chat with Charlie Bewley and Daniel Cudmore, veterans of The Twilight Saga pictures as members of the menacing Volturi vampire council, without being either, you know, decapitated or “changed.” They may be diabolically vicious onscreen but luckily neither…
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Three decades ago I spent many a late evening with Sybil Danning—the arresting Austrian model turned American movie star, she of the hourglass physique, disarming screen presence and tongue-meet-cheek relationship with her often outrageously entertaining movies—at the small-town Michigan drive-in where I was schooled…
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If ambition and scale were the sole criteria for judging movies, Cloud Atlas would be a towering achievement. But this sometimes daring movie, based on David Mitchell’s sprawling novel about the interconnectedness of humanity and lives that reverberate across centuries, is at best a…
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In The Sessions, John Hawkes is real-life poet Mark O’Brien, paralyzed from the neck down after a childhood polio affliction and relegated to an iron lung. At age 38, O’Brien decided it was time to lose his virginity and hired a sex surrogate, played…
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