<P>Last Holiday should not work. Its premise is weak, its outcome is never in doubt, and its humor tends to fluctuate between the banal and the uninspired. And yet somehow this remake of a darker 1950 Alec Guinness comedy overcomes all that and… [详细内容]
<P>Amazingly, writer/director/producer Audrey Wells has taken the simple, basically unexciting narrative spine of Under the Tuscan Sun, writer Frances Mayes' memoir about falling in love with a villa in Italy, and cleverly fictionalized it--wra… [详细内容]
<P>Time has not been completely kind to the 1939 version of "Wuthering Heights". Intended as a great tearjerker, it now comes across almost as camp. The hammy performances and dramatic dialogue are very entertaining, however.</P>
<P>The Emily… [详细内容]
<P>Charges of anti-Semitism have been leveled against The Merchant of Venice so many times that it's easy to overlook the play's other problems. An unwieldy mix of comedy and tragedy, the play has some of Shakespeare's least convincing plot twi… [详细内容]
<P>Romantic comedies sell fantasy. Ultimately, that's their reason for being - to make even the most cynical heart crave true love. Some romantic comedies, this one included, fail because of an inability to convince the audience that the protag… [详细内容]
<P>Empty is the head that wears the crown in "The Last Emperor," Bernardo Bertolucci's lavish biography of Pu Yi, the sheltered sovereign who found himself out of work when China became a republic in 1912. Pu Yi's personal tragedy has become Be… [详细内容]
<P>As I said in my review of the North and South DVD, I'd not read the book of North and South before watching this adaptation on TV. Having watched it I then went straight out and read the book. I'm quite pleased I did it this way, as I think … [详细内容]
<P>Is there really anything left to say about The Lord of the Rings? By now, everyone knows the story of how a Kiwi filmmaker with only a handful of low-budget horror flicks to his name convinced New Line Cinema to give him $300 million so he c… [详细内容]
<P>"Bicentennial Man" begins with promise, proceeds in fits and starts, and finally sinks into a cornball drone of greeting-card sentiment.</P>
<P>Robin Williams spends the first half of the film encased in a metallic robot suit, and when he … [详细内容]
<P>"The Horse Whisperer" is less a movie than a model of a movie made from a kit: Shake the box and you can hear the symbols and scenery rattling around in there, ready to be pieced together in an attractive fashion. There's supposed to be a st… [详细内容]
<P>The chief pleasure to be found in any version of Oscar Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest, is the dialogue, and Oliver Parker's re-interpretation is no different. All of the great lines are here: "The very essence of romance is un… [详细内容]
<P>When "Sleuth" premiered last month at the Toronto Film Festival, a great many critics (including me), writing in advance about it sight unseen, described it as a "remake" of the 1972 film based on Anthony Shaffer's stage play. The festival p… [详细内容]
<P>In this summer of sequel glut and computer-enhanced mayhem, Seabiscuit is a risky example of counterprogramming that just may lure an audience because it's so refreshingly unlike the competition. Based on Laura Hillenbrand's 2001 best-seller… [详细内容]
<P>The idea of a high school basketball coach who benches the whole team for getting lousy grades -- as real-life coach Ken Carter, of Richmond, Calif., did in the late '90s -- sounds like a dream come true for manly-man cultural conservatives,… [详细内容]
<P>In "The Last Emperor, a sweeping epic about Manchurian emperor Pu Yi, director Bernardo Bertolucci has an overwhelming task. And he comes so close to succeeding at it. </P>
<P>Bertolucci (with cowriter Mark Peploe) must show the lavish tra… [详细内容]