Actress Laura Linney was raised on the Upper East Side, but that doesn’t mean she was a natural to play the snooty mom-employer Mrs. X (whom she called “a mess—just a mess!”) in the film version of The Nanny Diaries. “It was one of those things where the clothes did so much for me,” said Read More
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, from his own screenplay, hits as close to home as a filmmaker can get in telling his own family’s story in the guise of an objective film narrative, without any heavenly-father first-person narration to jolly things along. On the whole, Mr. Baumbach avoids many pitfalls in dealing with Read More
In Her Shoes is pure joy. That’s not a word tossed around as freely as you think. In today’s movie market, there’s so little of it on view, and even if you get a glimpse, it’s fleeting. But this marvelous, up-with-the-lark movie stays sunny all day, with wit and intelligence to spare. After a fallow Read More
In Her Shoes is pure joy. That’s not a word tossed around as freely as you think. In today’s movie market, there’s so little of it on view, and even if you get a glimpse, it’s fleeting. But this marvelous, up-with-the-lark movie stays sunny all day, with wit and intelligence to spare. After a Read More
Alexander Payne’s Sideways, from a screenplay by Mr. Payne and Jim Taylor, has closed the 42nd New York Film Festival as felicitously as Agnès Jaoui’s Look at Me opened it. I have a great many more films to see before I can adequately evaluate what was shown in between, but the festival has already given Read More
Beauty, talent and charisma are such rare commodities these days that we are lucky to find an actress with even one of them. In Being Julia, Annette Bening miraculously displays all three at the same time. Am I losing it, or is she a 21st-century movie miracle? Is this the good turtle soup, or merely Read More
There are two compelling performances in the revival of David Margulies’ highly regarded Sight Unseen at the Biltmore Theatre, and I would see it for the terrific contributions of Laura Linney and Byron Jennings alone. But is Mr. Margulies’ 1992 play about a wunderkind New York painter and the price of success as great as Read More
Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun , from a screenplay by Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo, deserves the bad reviews and the lackluster earnings it has accumulated thus far. But I saw it at an interesting moment, an early-afternoon showing 72 hours before the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The audience, not surprisingly, consisted of me Read More
Slapping itself to death with red herrings, convoluted bleeding-heart propaganda and contrived plot maneuvers so confusing even Brian De Palma would have ordered a rewrite, The Life of David Gale is one strange movie. Still, I found most of it mesmerizing. Its flaws are many, and like so many movies do these days, it literally Read More
Peter Docter’s Monsters, Inc. was co-directed by Lee Unkrich and David Silverman, from a screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson, based on a story by Mr. Docter and animated by more people than I can count or credit. This is not an area of cinema with which I am either comfortable or confident. If Read More
