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4 articles
The Company You Keep
4 April 2013 9:30 PM, PDT
Socially relevant films for adults are so rare that you want to root for each one that comes along, especially from a filmmaker as imposing as Robert Redford. This one not only brings the actor back to the screen but surrounds him with an A-list cast. Alas, there’s no getting around the fact that The Company You Keep misses the mark, despite its promising ingredients. Shia Labeouf is quite good as an enterprising reporter for an Albany newspaper who misses out on a big story in his own back yard—the surrender of a woman who’s been on the FBI’s “most wanted” list for thirty years—but makes up for it with his dogged follow-through, looking up the other student radicals from the...
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- Leonard Maltin
Trance
4 April 2013 9:25 PM, PDT
Trance is a remake of a little-seen British TV movie from 2001 written and directed by Joe Ahearne. Danny Boyle’s remake makes me want to see the original, because while the new film starts out great, and seems to have the makings of a first-rate thriller, it doesn’t end up that way. James McAvoy works at a high-end London auction house, and gets involved with a sinister art thief played by Vincent Cassel and a sexy hypnotherapist, played by Rosario Dawson. A daring theft sets the serpentine story in motion, but Trance doesn’t know when to quit. After a great opening sequence that hooks you right away, it asks you to buy into a chain of increasingly improbable events. Then, at...
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- Leonard Maltin
Roger Ebert: More Than Just A Critic
4 April 2013 4:44 PM, PDT
I’m still in a state of shock over the news of Roger Ebert’s death, at age 70, so soon after going public about the recurrence of cancer in his system—and promising to file reviews as often as possible. That’s the Roger Ebert I’m thinking about right now: not the influential critic or the lifelong newspaperman who never missed a deadline, but the guy who faced a staggering series of health crises and refused to give in. He was the bravest person I’ve ever met. It helped that he had an equally indomitable partner in his devoted wife Chaz; they made a great team. It’s impossible to overstate the impact Roger and his longtime partner and rival Gene Siskel had on popular culture and the...
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- Leonard Maltin
John Ford’S Favorite Film
2 April 2013 9:42 PM, PDT
I don’t know if The Sun Shines Bright (1953) is John Ford’s most neglected film—there are numerous candidates on the Old Master’s résumé—but it is the one he cited as his personal favorite. Now it’s available on Blu-ray and DVD in a sparkling transfer from Olive Films. Unlike its forerunner Judge Priest (1934), the Will Rogers vehicle that fell into the public domain, this film is seldom revived. What’s more, Olive is offering the complete 100-minute version as Ford intended it, not the one that Republic Pictures’ Herbert J. Yates cut by ten minutes back in 1953. (Some twenty years ago Republic stumbled onto the uncut negative, which was meant for overseas distribution, and used it...
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- Leonard Maltin
4 articles
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