Month: April 2001

The Hornblower movies have all been cracking good yarns, pure adventure tales that are viscerally pleasurably in a way that too few movies — even theatrical ones — are lately. But in Retribution we get darker, richer characterizations than ever, which only makes the story all the more thrilling.

I am now in a peevish snit, arms crossed defensively against a movie that has crossed the line from silly if mildly amusing to absurd and ridiculous.

I’m sure your first thought upon learning that Josie and the Pussycats — Archie comic and Hanna-Barbera cartoon — was being reincarnated as a live-action movie was the same as my first thought: Verily, ’twill be cause for Master Shakespeare to spin within his cold grave!

Mark “Chopper” Read is one of Australia’s best-selling authors — he’s also a multiple murderer and generally notorious criminal. Now, his books recounting — and exaggerating — his life on the wrong side of the law have been turned into the blackest of crime comedies. Standup comic Eric Bana portrays Chopper with a fierce charisma … more…

A series of three short films depicting the passages in the lives of Iranian women, Day seems to brim with defiance in the face of society that restrict female freedom. But I wonder if that’s the intended effect… and if it is, would it also appear that way to a native audience?

Friends help you move; good friends help you move bodies. The inconvenient corpse here is Brian (Tom Mannion), and the pals trying to figure out what to do with him are his girlfriend, Petula (Rachel Weisz: Enemy at the Gates), and Dorothy (Susan Lynch) — the gals met when Dorothy whacked Brian about the skull … more…

I wouldn’t have thought a documentary about the connectedness of contemporary popular music would have been quite the right subject to take advantage of the IMAX format. Boy, was I wrong. If you’ve ever brought binoculars to an arena concert and strained to hear the lyrics through the distortion of the amps from way back … more…

A&E’s Hornblower movie series is back with two new installments, and settling in with them is almost as good as lying out in the backyard in the warm sun with a book that sweeps you up in rousing escapades and exotic locales. And these new films offer the darker thrills of a Stevenson novel. Grimmer than the first series of films, which began with The Duel and ended with a 1999 Emmy for Best Mini-Series, Mutiny and its continuation, Retribution, throw Our Hero into moral quagmires unlike any he has faced before.