James Franco and John Lithgow star in director Rupert Wyatt’s prequel. Some old potion is served up in a reasonably spiffy new bottle in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Resurrecting a lucrative franchise for another go-round 43 years after Charlton Heston first found himself on the short end of the evolutionary pyramid, Fox has wisely steered […]
Continue Reading
The “Harry Potter” prequel “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is a big-budget, holiday-timed blockbuster about … racism, which may not exactly be the joyful, escapist entertainment families are looking for this time of year. Certainly, J.K. Rowling’s entire literary and cinematic empire is based on a foundation of serious, moralistic themes, explored through an […]
Continue Reading
To say Bajrangi Bhaijaan is geared towards maximum emotional impact is an understatement. It is engineered for it. Its parts have been carefully assembled so as to make you laugh every other scene, tear up every 10 minutes. One normally gets this kind of emotional walloping with a Rajkumar Hirani film, but Bajrangi Bhaijaan hits […]
Continue Reading
Deep Purple famously asked their sound engineers to make “everything louder than everything else”, a phrase variously adopted by the likes of Motörhead and Meat Loaf to characterise their OTT ethos. It’s clearly struck a chord with George Miller as he reboots his low-budget 1979 road-warrior hit with more money, more trucks, and much more noise. Watching Mad Max: […]
Continue Reading
The musical score plays an even greater role in “The Godfather: Part II” than it did in the original film. Nostalgic, mournful, evoking lost eras, it stirs emotions we shouldn’t really feel for this story, and wouldn’t, if the score were more conventional for a crime movie. Why should we regret the passing of a […]
Continue Reading
The gang is back behind the wheel for this latest fuming blockbuster, which cruises along nimbly enough before putting the exhaust in exhaustion. The seventh instalment in any franchise is rarely the most anticipated. Police Academy: Mission to Moscow was the final straw. No-one looked forward to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Freddy’s 1994 stagger down […]
Continue Reading
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor is the story of Pu Yi, the last imperial ruler of China, crowned at the age of three, sheltered inside the Forbidden City through a constant wave of revolts and violent takeovers before becoming in turns an exile, despot, and gardener who treaded lightly as Mao’s cultural revolution took over the nation […]
Continue Reading
Eschewing the typical thrills for a more wordy, philosophical take on the genre, this true-life gangster film backs its brawn with brains. Marco Bellochio’s historical crime epic The Traitor opens at a Cosa Nostra party in Sicily, senior criminals wandering lavish grounds, greeting each other with smiles that barely conceal rivalries, poison and murder behind their eyes. […]
Continue Reading
For fans and critics alike, Brokeback Mountain will forever be known as the “gay cowboy” movie. Almost invariably, the emphasis will be placed on the first half of that label–and understandably so: The love, briefly indulged and long inhibited, between Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist is the narrative and emotional core of the film and of […]
Continue Reading
New version of Jack London’s classic man-meets-dog adventure digitizes its canine hero—and loses something vital in the process Harrison Ford and a CGI-generated dog star in the latest screen adaptation of Jack London’s classic 1903 adventure novel. There have been movie adaptations of Jack London’s classic 1903 novel The Call of the Wild dating as far back […]
Continue Reading