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110 records found

REVIEW

Tortilla Soup (2001)

Tortilla Soup isn’t the delicacy that Eat Drink Man Woman was, nor does it compare with the exquisite meals prepared by the patriarchs of either film. But on the level of comfort food this remake is enjoyable enough, unless of course you’re a purist conoisseur like Martin. Watching it, I laughed out loud any number of times, and so did others in the theater.

 REVIEW

Touching the Void (2003)

Forget Cast Away. Forget Alive. Touching the Void, the true story of a pair of daredevil mountain climbers in the Peruvian Andes, may be the most harrowing, dazzling, haunting survival story ever filmed.

 POST

The Tourist [video] (2011)

Johnny Depp is a wet blanket, and Angelina Jolie cranks the glamour so high she’s no longer human, in this would-be Charade style light-hearted romantic thriller. (There is one good scene, the boat chase in Venice.)

 REVIEW

Tower Heist (2011)

How could anyone in Hollywood have known, as the current batch of movies went into development, that at least three different films about the greed and ruthlessness of the wealthy few and its devastating impact on the masses—the 1% and the 99%—would hit theaters more or less simultaneously in the middle of the Occupy protests?

 POST

Tower Heist [video]

Here’s my 30-second take on Tower Heist.

REVIEW

Toy Story (1995)

Toy Story, the first-ever fully computer-animated feature and the film that put Pixar Studios on the map, is more than a technical tour de force. It’s moviemaking alchemy — a breathtakingly perfect blend of wide-eyed childhood wonder and wry adult humor, yesteryear nostalgia and eye-popping novelty, rollicking storytelling and touchingly honest emotion.

 REVIEW

Toy Story 2 (1999)

It’s the best kind of sequel, the kind that neither repeats the original nor merely adds to it, but lovingly builds upon it and goes beyond it into narrative and emotional territory no first film could reach.

 REVIEW

Toy Story 3 (2010)

At times Toy Story 3 feels a bit less fleet-footed than its predecessors, though there’s nothing that doesn’t work. Lee Unkrich, who co-directed Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, directs with a sure hand. The story is stuffed with wit and invention, such as a couple of premise-bending applications of the Potato Heads’ modular body parts and some hilarious riffing on Ken and Barbie.

 Toy Story 4 REVIEW

Toy Story 4 (2019)

Toy Story 4 does not continue the story of the first three films, but casts about for new things to do in this world with the sprawling cast of characters in Bonnie’s orbit, most of whom once revolved around the now-absent figure of Andy.

 Toy Story 4 [video] POST

Toy Story 4 [video] (2019)

For the first time, Pixar has made a Toy Story movie that adds nothing essential to the arc of the previous films. It’s still worth seeing.

 REVIEW

Trade (2007)

Trade needed to be the United 93 of the human trafficking crisis. It’s closer to being the World Trade Center.

 The Tragedy of Macbeth REVIEW

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Fog and mist, translucent pavilion sidewalls, blowing curtains, dark water, shadows, reflections: the film is full of motifs evoking the murkiness in which Macbeth’s last days play out.

 REVIEW

The Train (1964)

How do you weigh the cultural heritage of a nation against the value of human life? That’s the subtext of The Train, a wholly persuasive, intelligent thriller crisply directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) with documentary-like realism and emphasis on action and problem-solving.

 <em>The Train</em>: When is art worth dying for? ARTICLE

The Train: When is art worth dying for?

Are manmade things ever worth dying for? How do you weigh the value of art or artifacts against the value of human life? On the one hand, human life is sacred; things are just things. On the other, the cultural heritage of a people is an irreplaceable treasure that belongs not only to the whole community, but to all future generations.

 REVIEW

Training Day (2001)

Washington’s knockout performance is the main reason to see Training Day. It may also be the crux of the film’s moral difficulty.

 POST

Transformers: Age of Extinction [video] (2014)

If Michael Bay can take 165 minutes for his latest Transformers movie, I can take two minutes to review it.

 REVIEW

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

Like the title phrase, which is recognizably English and yet obviously wrong, Dark of the Moon offers just enough vestiges of grammatical intelligibility to be recognizable as a bloated, steroid-inflamed simulacrum of a mindless summer blockbuster action movie. I almost think it would be better, or at least it would hurt less, if it were a bit more incomprehensible, although I’m told that its predecessor, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, actually was, and it didn’t help.

 ARTICLE

Treading the Dawn: Bringing Dawn Treader From Book to Film

Douglas Gresham, Walden Media’s Micheal Flaherty and C. S. Lewis scholar Devin Brown discuss the book and the film.

 REVIEW

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Riveting, downbeat, and full of surprises, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is both a gripping adventure and one of Hollywood’s best and most resonant morality tales, a smart and remorseless story of gold, greed, guns, and guile in the mountains of Mexico.

 REVIEW

Treasure Planet (2002)

(Written by Jimmy Akin) Treasure Planet is Robert Louis Stevenson meets George Lucas. More specifically, it’s Treasure Island meets The Phantom Menace.