In the tradition of any number of stories where a boy from the wrong side of the tracks falls for a posh girl, Step Up follows rebellious Tyler as he's forced to work with ballet dancer Nora to create a performance that could change both of their lives forever. Naturally, as young people thrown into these sorts of situations are wont to do, they fall madly and passionately in love, ...
Ever since the late 1970s when the Australian New Wave was in full surge, Down Under directors have delivered movies that often hit you like news from another planet. Offbeat characters, weird narrative twists and a tart mixture of laughs and catastrophe--this is the juice that fuels such flicks as Proof, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Strictly Ballroom, ...
A briskly paced hybrid of Boogie Nights and Goodfellas, Blow chronicles the three-decade rise and fall of George Jung (Johnny Depp), a normal American kid who makes a personal vow against poverty, builds a marijuana empire in the 1960s, multiplies his fortune with the Colombian Medellín cocaine cartel, and blows it all with a series of police busts culminating in one final, ...
One of the best romantic comedies of the 1990s, My Best Friend's Wedding not only gave Julia Roberts a delightful vehicle for her crowd-pleasing comeback, but it further distinguished itself by avoiding the conventional plotting of the genre. Julia plays a prominent Chicago restaurant critic whose best friend (Dermot Mulroney) is a former lover from her college days with whom she'd made a ...
So much anticipation pools up around the concluding episode of this concluding season that you might be tempted to head straight for said finale, titled "Everyone's Waiting" (and it's so rich you'll find yourself drawn to repeated viewings). But if you can avoid that impulse, it's worth following the full build-up of one crisis after another to get the real payoff. On an episode-by-episode basis, ...
This curiously dry adaptation of Thomas Hardy's last novel, Jude is a good example of Michael Winterbottom's inability to make a particularly good film until Welcome to Sarajevo. Christopher Eccleston plays Jude Fawley, a self-educated stonemason who holds the dream of attending university but identifies with the working class. Kate Winslet is enlisted to play his cousin Sue ...