Hugo (2011), Martin Scorsese’s first family film (it’s PG!) and his first engagement with 3D, is a love letter to the magic of cinema. Based on the novel by Brian Selznick, it is a tribute to early film pioneer George Méliès (played by Ben Kinsgley), a child’s adventure through a grown-up world of loss and […]
Michael Keaton was a newly-minted comedy star when he took the lead in Mr. Mom (1983) as a dedicated automobile engineer who loses his job due to corporate cost-cutting and becomes a househusband taking care of his three young children while his housemaker wife (Teri Garr) goes back to work for an advertising firm. It […]
John Huston was not just one of the great American directors, he was the great translator of literary works from page to screen. He began his directorial career with The Maltese Falcon, not simply an iconic detective film and a defining film noir but an adaptation so precise that the previous screen versions have been […]
Enchanted April (1991) – Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson are the two quietly miserable middle class wives who impulsively (and passionately) decide to escape their dreary world in post-World War I London and their distracted, pompous husbands and rent a castle on the Italian coast. When they wake up in their villa after a rainy […]
The wacky minds of Monty Python took on the legend of King Arthur for Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, PG), their first “real” feature film (I’m not counting their skit comedy And Now For Something Completely Different) and Camelot has never been the same. Graham Chapman is King Arthur (the closest the film […]
There isn’t another rock documentary in the world like The Kids Are Alright (1979). This is no familiar biographical narrative or historical overview talking about their generation, but a scrappy, vibrant musical portrait painted in the bold colors of rock itself: impassioned lyrics, power chords, crashing drums and smashing guitars. Die-hard fans of The Who […]
With The Illusionist (France, 2010), animator Sylvain Chomet (of the delirious The Triplets of Belleville) transforms an unproduced script by they great French auteur Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle) into a tender tale of a French magician and a Scottish girl in the theater-folk society of London as the old world of stage performance gives way […]
Mary and the Witch’s Flower (Japan, 2017), the magical fantasy by Japanese animator and filmmaker Hiromasa Yonebayashi (director of the marvelous When Marnie Was There), based on a children’s novel by British author Mary Stewart, follows the adventures of a schoolgirl who receives magical powers for a day from a magical flower that blooms once […]
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016) is a different kind of animated superhero film, a flashback to the tongue-in-cheek approach of the 1960s Batman TV series. It isn’t really a theatrical feature—it was produced for Warner Bros.’s DCU Original Animation unit for VOD and home video—but perhaps thanks to the nostalgic pull of the […]
The Odyssey (France, 2016) is not Homer’s mythic quest but the epic voyage that Jacques Cousteau took around the world for years of TV documentaries on the exploration for marine life. Lambert Wilson is Jacques-Yves Cousteau in a biographical drama that presents a portrait of a man cultivating an on-screen image very different from the […]
