In TV terms, the biographical film âMike Wallace Is Hereâ is effectively a feature-length recap. Using only archival footage, the director Avi Belkin distills more than five decades of the longtime â60 Minutesâ correspondentâs career on camera to an hour and a half. Presenting Wallace with relatively little mediation is a natural way to tell this story, even as it creates a limitation. Documentary as autobiography, the movie shows a man who is always cultivating his appearance for an audience...
It takes confidence and a healthy amount of narcissism to direct yourself in a farce about two women who engage in competitive psychological gamesmanship for the pleasure of your company. That is true even if you are not the scriptâs sole author (and the other is veteran screenwriter and longtime Luis Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude CarriĂšre).
Itâs fitting that âMissing Link,â which concerns a lovable creature a step behind on the evolutionary ladder, has been made with stop-motion animation, the painstaking process by which models and puppets are photographed to create the illusion of movement. In form and content, itâs a movie about fighting obsolescence. The perfection of the computer animation would simply be wrong.
Apart from Frederick Wisemanâs âEx Libris: The New York Public Library,â few movies have celebrated book-lending institutions as havens of fair-mindedness and pluralism, so itâs tempting to give a pass to âThe Publicâ as a rousing, lovingly made civics lesson, even if its screenplay does not seem fated for shelves.
By NASAâs estimate, 530 million people watched Neil Armstrongâs walk on the moon in July 1969, making it one of the most widely seen television events in history. Now a new film allows moviegoers to experience the Apollo 11 mission from unexpected angles through mesmerizing footage and recordings that were never intended for a large viewership â or even necessarily for the public.
For roughly the first 50 minutes of âParkland: Inside Building 12,â students and teachers recall last yearâs attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in harrowing detail: who heard what and when, who hid where, which doors were locked, who was bleeding or killed. Much of the second hour is then devoted to remembering the 17 dead, one by one. At the close, when Emma GonzĂĄlez is shown reciting their names at the March for Our Lives rally, we have a mental image of each person.
âIsnât It Romanticâ is the second comedy in less than a week, after âWhat Men Want,â in which a woman gains the power to improve her life following a concussion.
âWhat Men Wantâ presumes a lot of things about its viewers. One is that they wonât tolerate a satire of workplace sexism if it doesnât sometimes put the woman in her place. Another is a taste for Fiji water, an object of product placement so frequent that you worry for a drought in the South Pacific.
Having sold out at event screenings since December, âThey Shall Not Grow Old,â which opens for a full run this week, is poised to become the only blockbuster this year that was filmed from 1914 to 1918, on location on the Western Front. Commissioned to make a movie for the centennial of the armistice, using original footage, Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britainâs Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.
Opening on the 71st anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the conspiracy thriller âThe Gandhi Murderâ begins with a claim to be âbased on verified facts.â Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.
As animation has trended toward the precision that comes from working with computers, it has become refreshing to encounter throwbacks to less âperfectâ styles.
In Arthur Conan Doyleâs original telling, Sherlock Holmes indulged in morphine and cocaine because the drugs offered him a break from âthe dull routine of existence.â His mind, Dr. Watson recalls him saying in âThe Sign of Fourâ (1890), rebelled at âstagnation.â Problems, work and cryptograms: Their inspiration would permit him to dispense with âartificial stimulants.â
In âPhil,â Greg Kinnear acts and directs, which has left him without at least one important person to say âno.â Still, even the most exacting auteur might have labored to help him make sense of this title character. The film opens with Phil, a suicidal dentist, preparing to throw himself off a bridge, then backing off, despite the encouragement of onlookers and the thematically appropriate musical accompaniment of â(I Never Promised You a) Rose Gardenâ on his car radio.
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