Sands of Iwo Jima, The

Mira Sorvino is the only triumphant thing about this inept adaptation of a Marivaux play.

Antz directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson begins with unmistakable Woody Allen—i.e. not some animated ant named “Z”—in analysis, feeling neurotic because, as the middle child of 5 million he didn’t get a lot of attention as a child. He tells the doctor that he is intimidated by the ant work-ethic: “Everything for the…

Almost Famous begins in 1969 with a literary discussion about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird between a precocious eleven year-old, William Miller (Michael Angarano), and his widowed mother, Elaine (Frances McDormand). A college professor in San Diego, Elaine has obviously invested a great deal of hope in her son, whom she intends to be…

Character by Mike Van Diem, the Dutch winner of the Academy Award for best foreign film, is an astonishingly old fashioned picture, of a sort (here is a sobering thought) that simply could not be made in America today. Some representative of the feminist thought police would have got to it long before it was…

The one slightly sour note in Nora Ephron’s cloyingly sweet Julie & Julia comes near the end of the film when one of our two heroines, Julie Powell (Amy Adams), has become a hit with the public — or at least enough of a hit to realize the prospect of the book deal which will…

Flubber, directed by Les Mayfield, is a Disney remake of an original Disney movie of 1961 about a wonderful kind of “flying rubber” and called The Absent Minded Professor, directed by Robert Stevenson. It wasn’t a very good movie the first time around and it is, naturally enough, a much worse movie in the remake….