reviews

There’s no question that Roger Kabler is a startlingly gifted impersonator, with a repertoire that runs from John Travolta and Robert DeNiro to Robin Williams and Richard Dreyfuss, but this independently produced film is little more than an excuse to string together Kabler’s routines. The fictional story, “based on” Kabler’s “experiences,” follows the breakdown of … more…

The beloved children’s book by Eleanor H. Porter gets a transplant from early-20th-century Vermont to Edwardian England in this British production, and that’s just fine: the indefatigable cheerfulness of its young heroine remains intact, and that’s all that matters. When the newly orphaned Pollyanna (delightful newcomer Georgina Terry) goes to live with her dour aunt, … more…

Writer/director Paul Feig, the Emmy-nominated creator of TV’s Freaks and Geeks, brings us a different kind of outcast kid in David, a 12-year-old orphan escapee from a post-WWII Bulgarian labor camp journeying across Europe alone. In the best tradition of old-fashioned family films — the kind without fart jokes and precocious gradeschoolers, the kind that … more…

A photographer drives dusty desert roads, stopping occasionally to shoot crumbling ruins and barren landscapes — another example, one imagines right then, but not an unwelcome one, of the feature-length loneliness-and-desolation metaphors that sear achingly through contemporary Iranian film till you can feel the pain of an astoundingly creative industry cut off from the wider … more…

“Priests can’t deny their sexuality, gay or otherwise.” Whoa. And it’s a man of the cloth who utters this dangerous line. Double whoa. It’s only the future of the largest religious organization on the planet that filmmaker John Deery chose for his writing and directing debut, and the result is a film both astonishing in … more…

How’s this for a ‘hare-brained scheme’? You’re an upper-middle-class middle-aged man, still madly in love with your wife after decades together, and on the first Christmas after your now-grown daughter has flown the coop, you figure: Hey, maybe me and the little lady should skip the insanity of the holidays this year and treat ourselves to something special, like maybe a cruise of the islands.

I spent most of *Alexander* squirming, checking my watch, and occasionally busting out in derisive guffaws. Oliver Stone has perhaps finally gone round the bend: this is a disaster of a film, three hours of butt-numbing tedium punctuated by moments of hilarious high camp.

How many movies make you feel like a sophisticate just for having seen them? An evening out to see Federico Fellini’s masterwork — the new print beautifully shows off Otello Martelli’s silvery, creamy black-and-white cinematography — is just about as good for imparting a sense of jaded elegance as an impromptu trip to the Continent. … more…