Theater/Film Reviews
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Embraces
Pedro Almodovar is one of the great movie directors, Penelope Cruz holds equal status as an actress. Put them together, as in "Broken Embraces," which opens here today, and an above-average movie, with a strong story and superior production and entertainment values, is assured. This is the fifth time Almodovar and Cruz have worked
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Up In The Air
Apologies are in order: This review was written for posting on Dec. 11, the day the movie opened. Somewhere along the way, a glitch appeared in cyberspace and the review remained in the files. It's three weeks since the opening, but opinions remain intact. Despite all the hoop-la and hi-de-ho that have surrounded it,
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Nine
Movies are made to be a lot of things. They can be quiet, introspective, thoughtful stories that deal in relationships and philosophy, tense tales of murder and mystery, struggles over life and property on a wild frontier. One of the things they do best is to serve as a setting for a spectacle, big and
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The Young Victoria
Victoria, Princess of Kent, was born in 1819. She became Queen Victoria in 1837, married Albert three years later and gave her name not only to a roster of English royalty but also to a half-century, a style of living and many other things, "The Young Victoria," a modest entertainment, stars Emily Blunt and Rupert
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An O. Henry Christmas
William Sidney Porter, generally known as O. Henry before the candy bar was created, may have been this country's finest short-story writer. He wrote in the early days of the last century for dozens of magazines. Two of his best-known tales have been adapted, with music, and put together as "An O. Henry Christmas,"
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Avatar
We have only a fortnight before 2009 comes to an end, and it took us all this time for a truly execrable movie, the worst of the year, to hit local screens. But "Avatar" opens today as the latest piece of too-long, too-dull, too-violent claptrap to come from the imagination of James Cameron, and
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Flame and Citron
Throughout history, conquered nations have fought back against their oppressors. Guerrilla fighters, operating in small groups, have used murder, arson and other tactics — criminal in times of peace — to disrupt and harass the occupying forces. The Danes, like the French, the Dutch and others, put as much pressure as possible on the German
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White Christmas
There are several ways to look at "Irving Berlin's White Christmas," which opened a two-week run at the Fox Theatre last night: 1–It's a heart-warming nostalgic look back to the days of World War II, when war was a good thing; it features Irving Berlin's songs, almost always a joy; it has good dancing;
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Invictus
The title is a dead giveaway: "Invictus," which opens today, will be a simplistic, but highly dramatic movie, like practically all movies that bear Clint Eastwood's fingerprints. It will show a world where there is a wide chasm between good people and evil people, and the good people will win, but the evil people
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A Man for All Seasons
When King Henry VIII of England fell for Anne Boleyn in 1526, it began a romance that turned Europe upside down. Henry already was married to Catherine (or Katherine) of Aragon, daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. About three years later,Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the Henry-Catherine marriage null and