With the Reno brothers robbing trains and banks across Indiana they use the town of Seymour as their retreat, paying a trio of officials to keep schtum. But their whereabouts is known by the Peterson Detective Agency who send in one of their men, James Barlow (Randolph Scott), to pose as an outlaw and not…

At the start of the movie, gambler Dan Kehoe (Clark Gable) is on the run from a posse and gets away only by riding down steep hills where they won’t go.  He finds himself in the town of Touchstone in the southwest, where he hears about the McDade family of outlaw brothers, based at a…

The defence of Rorke’s Drift is one of the most revered episodes in British military history. After the battle of 22-23 January 1879, 11 men received the Victoria Cross, the British Empire’s highest award for gallantry — the largest number of VCs ever awarded for a single engagement. In brutal contrast, the war opened with…

Shoot Out represents the final western to be directed by Henry Hathaway. A man who had given us a wide variety of successful oaters including Rawhide, Nevada Smith and True Grit among many films of all genres, notably a fine run of Noir titles like Kiss of Death and Niagara. I suspect the goal here…

A tale about the infamous 17th century pirate captain William Kidd. The modestly budgeted film sails the high seas on Charles Laughton’s sea legs, as his sly ruthless portrayal of Captain Kidd gives this film its force. But it promises more action than it delivers, as it bogs down with too much chatter to be…

THE FINAL scene of 1969 crime caper The Italian Job has gone down as one of cinema’s greatest ever climaxes. However, according to its producer the literal cliffhanger moment was not meant to be the end of the story. The scene that made its way onto the big screen involved a Harrington Legionnaire coach, carrying…

“Rio Lobo,” which turned out to be Howard Hawks very last picture, represents his weakest collaboration with John Wayne’. Hawks and Wayne had previously made thee terrific films, “Red River,” “Hatari!” and “Rio Bravo,” and one mediocre, “El Dorado.” Hawks described the special relationship he had with Wayne in the following way: “For Rio Lobo,…

John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” is a left-wing parable, directed by a right-wing American director, about how a sharecropper’s son, a barroom brawler, is converted into a union organizer. The message is boldly displayed, but told with characters of such sympathy and images of such beauty that audiences leave the theater feeling more pity…

Eastwood doesn’t care; he says to hell with the Bill of Rights and stalks out of the district attorney’s office. But when Scorpio hijacks the school bus, it is Eastwood again, who is asked to be bag man and carry the ransom. This time he refuses. He wants Scorpio on his own. We’ve already seen…

It must be heartbreaking to be able to appreciate true genius and yet fall just short of it yourself. A man can spend his entire life studying to be a mathematician–and yet watch helplessly while a high school dropout, a janitor, scribbles down the answers to questions the professor is baffled by. It’s also heartbreaking…

“The Fifth Element” is one of the great goofy movies–a film so preposterous I wasn’t surprised to discover it was written by a teenage boy. That boy grew up to become Luc Besson director of good smaller movies and bizarre big ones, and here he’s spent $90 million to create sights so remarkable they really ought…

The Guildford Four were framed; there seems to be no doubt about that. A feckless young Irishman named Gerry Conlon and three others were charged by the British police with being the IRA terrorists who bombed a pub in Guildford, England, in 1974, and a year later they were convicted and sentenced to life. But…

ou do not believe you can kill them all? Why not? Why not? We are halfway there already. In 1994 in Rwanda, a million members of the Tutsi tribe were killed by members of the Hutu tribe in a massacre that took place while the world looked away. “Hotel Rwanda” is not the story of…

”The World According to Garp,” is a gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one. George Roy Hill has directed ”Garp” very capably, and Steve Tesich’s screenplay is generally sensitive and economical. Together they have done their best to make the novel’s concerns understandable. Though their ”Garp” isn’t wholly successful, their accomplishment in adapting it to…

“Only connect!”— E.M. Forster That is the advice he gives us in Howards End, and then, in A Passage to India, he creates a world in which there are no connections, where Indians and Englishmen speak the same language but do not understand each other, where it doesn’t matter what you say in the famous…

A round-robin of praise is immediately in order for all those, and they were many indeed, who assisted in filming “Life With Father.” All that the fabulous play had to offer in the way of charm, comedy, humor and gentle pathos is beautifully realized in the handsomely Technicolored picture. William Powell is every inch Father,…

Nearly everything about Leone’s last film—and greatest masterwork—speaks to the grand illusion of the American Dream. Narratively, it is steeped in the rich, aggressively violent history of the early days of our immigrant-hating nation, depicting quite brutally the underpinnings of male-oriented corruption that render many of today’s power structures. Contextually, the film as a cultural…

There is something rich and strange and generous in Matteo Garrone’s new live-action version of the Pinocchio story, for which the director and his co-screenwriter Massimo Ceccherini have gone back to the original 1883 children’s tale by Carlo Collodi. They have given us a story which combines sentimentality and grotesqueness in a very startling way….

In December of 1787, H.M.S. Bounty lay in Portsmouth harbor in England, on the eve of departure for Tahiti in the uncharted waters of the Great South Sea. Its mission was to procure breadfruit trees for transplanting to the West Indies as cheap food for slaves. But it wouldn’t succeed, thanks to a famous mutiny,…

This new movie honors Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic English children’s novel “The Secret Garden,” published originally in 1911. In this context, the utmost compliment one could pay to director Marc Munden and screenwriter Jack Thorne (“The Aeronauts” and “His Dark Materials”), is that it understands what makes Burnett’s work a worthwhile text to come back…

“Does no one here want to know the truth, Mr. Archer?” the Countess (Michelle Pfeiffer) asks Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis) in “The Age of Innocence.” “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who ask you only to pretend.”   “It was the spirit of it — the spirit of the exquisite…

“We think of this place like an intensive care ward of a hospital.” So says Paul Edgecomb, who is in charge of Death Row in a Louisiana penitentiary during the Depression. Paul (Tom Hanks) is a nice man, probably nicer than your average Louisiana Death Row guard, and his staff is competent and humane–all except…

“Schindler’s List” is described as a film about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust supplies the field for the story, rather than the subject. The film is really two parallel character studies–one of a con man, the other of a psychopath. Oskar Schindler, who swindles the Third Reich, and Amon Goeth, who represents its pure evil,…

Money maestro Marty Byrde (Bateman, who also serves an executive producer and occasional director) and his wife Wendy (Linney) continue to skate on the knife’s edge, running a casino that’s essentially a front to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel. There are bad bosses, and then there are those for whom failure truly isn’t…

When we first see Jesse Eisenberg  in “Resistance,” he is wearing a Charlie Chaplin mustache and performing mime. His angry father, a Kosher butcher, pursues him into an alley. “Look at you, dressed as Hitler and performing in a whorehouse.” Eisenberg’s character, Marcel, corrects him about the Hitler/Chaplin confusion and further clarifies that it’s a cabaret…

“That’s how this happens – everyone is afraid.” HBO’s excellent mini-series “The Plot Against America” is the kind of nuanced, detailed storytelling we should expect from David Simon, Ed Burns, and Philip Roth. It is not so much about people who do wrong as what happens when people choose not to do what’s right. Roth’s story brilliantly captures…

Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables” is haunted by the memory of the fall of 2005, when riots broke out in the suburbs of Paris (and other cities), riots which raged for three terrible weeks. The mostly North African immigrant population in these suburbs were protesting the constant police harassment as well as the tragic death of…

In his good-natured feature debut “Uncorked,” writer/director Prentice Penny (“Insecure,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) braids a formulaic father-and-son tale with a gifted African-American sommelier-to-be’s pursuit of his advanced palate. That scheme alone sets “Uncorked” apart from the typical “wine movie,” admittedly in short supply already. The filmmaker doesn’t really steer clear of box-ticking clichés. But Penny still…

“The Call of the Wild” is based on the episodic Jack London classic published in 1903 about a pampered pooch who triumphs over abuse to find purpose and community, and then is increasingly drawn to the limitless world beyond civilization. Harrison Ford plays John Thornton, a grizzled loner living in the Yukon who drinks to numb the pain of…

Emma may live alone on a giant estate with her father (Bill Nighy), but her world is very crowded. She has “taken on” Harriet (Mia Goth), an orphaned girl of unknown parentage, boarding at a local girls’ school. Harriet has a crush on Mr. Martin, a humble widowed farmer (Connor Swindells), and based on Harriet…

“Sisters, sisters! Let’s talk about hair. Hair can be freedom or bondage. The choice is yours.” – Octavia Spencer as Madam C.J. Walker Black women’s hair has been knotted and snarled by issues of race, politics, history, and pride for centuries. Hair is not just our crowning glory, but a sort of declaration of our spirit. For…

The abusive male himself might be unseen, but the fear he spreads is in plain sight in “The Invisible Man,” Leigh Whannell’s sophisticated sci-fi-horror that dares to turn a woman’s often silenced trauma from a toxic relationship into something unbearably tangible. Charged by a constant psychological dread that surpasses the ache of any visible bruise, Whannell’s…

“If you ain’t into fishing, you’re in the wrong place.” So sings the burly, bearded, sort-of Greek chorus of this coastal small town shaggy dog tale of homicide and how not to cover it up. Priscilla (Sophie Lowe) and Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) are young adult sisters whose mom, who ran what looks like a…

Clint Eastwood’s new movie “Richard Jewell,” about the man who did heroic service at a terrorist bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics, only to face accusations of staging the bombing itself, is about a number of things, and the lure of irresponsibility is among them. It’s not a lure to which the title character…

Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life,” the true story of a World War II conscientious objector, is one of his finest films, and one of his most demanding. It clocks in at nearly three hours, moves in a measured way (you could call the pacing “a stroll”), and requires a level of concentration and openness to…

“Standing Up, Falling Down” is a movie that uses such a quaint title as honest advertising—there will be jokes, but it’ll be a little cheesy too. The two qualities come to life when it’s the people who embody that process, and in this case it’s the inspired pairing of Ben Schwartz and Billy Crystal as two new friends who…

“The Last Full Measure” covers the 1999 battle to obtain the Medal of Honor for deceased Air Force Airman William Pitsenbarger. Killed in combat in one of the bloodiest missions of the Vietnam War, Pitsenbarger saved many lives but was awarded what his family and the men he saved and served with considered a lesser…

“Ride due west as the sun sets; turn left at the Rocky Mountains . . .” And following these directions, young Jeremiah Johnson begins his search for “bear, beaver and other critters worth cash for trapping.” It is to become a lifetime journey, a total redefinition of the man. It takes him into a beautiful,…

Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen” plays like a tall tale, a yarn heard at the corner pub, filled with exaggerations and embellishments, where the storyteller expects you to pay his bar tab at the end. And maybe you won’t mind doing so. The narrator here is a conniving unscrupulous private detective (redundant adjectives, perhaps) named Fletcher (Hugh…

“The Way Back” is about a ragtag basketball team at a Catholic high school, and a damaged alcoholic coach (Ben Affleck) who finds a way to force them into being winners, into being better people, even. Jack Cunningham (Affleck) is a mess. He works construction and spends his nights at a dive bar, where he…

I am invisible, understand, because people refuse to see me.” This excerpt from the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is mentioned during a seemingly inconsequential moment in Chinonye Chukwu’s sophomore feature effort, “Clemency,” yet its essence reverberates through every frame. As prison warden Bernadine (Woodard) walks dutifully to work down a corridor during the opening…

Most movie-goers will concede that, during his Hollywood years, Alfred Hitchcock crafted four masterpieces: 1954’s Rear Window, 1958’s Vertigo, 1959’s  North by Northwest, and 1960’s Psycho. What divides fans and critics about these movies is choosing which one deserves to be crowned the best. Although my sympathies lie with Rear Window, one can find as many boosters for each…

“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with ‘The 39 Steps,’ ” Robert Towne, the screenwriter of “Chinatown,” once remarked of the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock thriller, which has just been rereleased by Criterion. Hitchcock, drawing on characters and situations created by John Buchan (an action novelist he adored), concocted…

The true-life story of US lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s battle to free an Alabama man wrongfully convicted of murder Adapted from activist lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, subtitled “A Story of Justice and Redemption”, Destin Daniel Cretton’s timely legal drama is, for the most part, as admirably understated as its subject. Largely eschewing dramatic speechifying in…

“1917,” the new film from Sam Mendes,  is set amidst the turmoil of World War I and takes place in and around the so-called “no man’s land” in northern France separating British and German troops. Two young corporals, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), are awoken from what could have only been a few…

“Courage doesn’t grow overnight,”  “That first mountain is probably the hardest, but it definitely needs to be crossed,” Greta Gerwig 2017 after ‘Lady Bird premiere.  Emphasizing her continued desire to pursue her calling as a director, after finally putting herself out there with a solo effort. How right she was about that calling and how immensely…

The experiences in the film “American Gigolo” may be alien to us, but the emotions of the characters are not: Julian Kay, the gigolo of the title, is played by Richard Gere as tender, vulnerable, and a little dumb. We care about him. His business — making love to rich women of a certain age…

“Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo as an attorney trying to punish the DuPont chemical corporation for dumping toxic waste in West Virginia, is a lone-crusader-against-the-corrupt-system film. Ruffalo stars as Robert Billott, a Cincinnati, Ohio attorney for Taft Stettinius & Hollister, a firm that represents major corporations, including DuPont, one of the world’s most powerful chemical manufacturers….

Set in London in 2009, the film opens as two people of a certain age find themselves chatting on a dating website and agree to meet for a casual dinner. This is where Roy (Ian McKellan) and Betty (Helen Mirren) come together and after an initial bit of awkwardness—each one utilized a fake name online—they…

With machiavellian characters and sharp dialogue, the series Succession has everything you hope to see in a story about a family business where the king is growing weak. An old man, frail, confused and lost, is feeling his way in the pitch dark. “Where am I?” he asks, breathing heavily. We can’t help, because we…