Arts + Life

"In America" may be the best immigrant movie ever made in the English language.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The director has succeeded in returning our Western culture, especially America, to myths and legends of camaraderie.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time

A romantic comedy American cinema can be proud of.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

In "Something's Gotta Give," Jack Nicholson plays a wealthy music magnate capably aided by National Board of Review winner Diane Keaton as a mid-fifty year old playwright with a young daughter dating Jack.

There's something about this "Stuck on You" that sticks to me.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

An interview with director Arthur Penn on "Mickey One"

By Clay Lowe, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

On October 28, 2003 Arthur Penn was presented the Savannah Film Festival's "Achievement in Cinema Award" by the Savannah College of Art and Design, the festival's host. Following the awards ceremony there was a retrospective screening of Penn's more well known "Bonnie and Clyde."

You do not have a credible performance by Tom Cruise in the titular role.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"The Last Samurai" is formulaic epic: exotic location, historical shift in culture (Japan on the brink of modernism), a singular hero tested to the max, and warfare on a grand scale. Add grand cinematography with over 21/2 hours of screen time, and you have a Hollywood epic.

You do not have a credible performance by Tom Cruise in the titular role.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"The Last Samurai" is formulaic epic: exotic location, historical shift in culture (Japan on the brink of modernism), a singular hero tested to the max, and warfare on a grand scale. Add grand cinematography with over 21/2 hours of screen time, and you have a Hollywood epic.

Connolly is a joy on-screen...but even he has a few awkward moments on screen. He easily gets the award for Most Artificial Acting in a Napping Scene.

By Dan Mushalko

You won't see any Oscar-winning performances in Timeline, the latest flick based on a Michael Crichton sci-fi novel. Yet, despite some awkward acting and Crichton's trademark forced-plot motion, it's a fun movie that's well worth the time spent in line with the holiday cinema crowd.

First, the basics:

Those who long to be in touch with poetic icons of the last century will welcome whatever bits of insight it gives.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time

"Sylvia" is an engaging biopic of poet Sylvia Plath's emotional juggernaut marriage to poet Ted Hughes. It reminds me of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in the also emotionally rich "Frida." But in neither case do we ever get an understanding of how the artists actually construct their art from their minds and their lives. Perhaps that exploration can never be done in film.

Blanchette carves out a memorable stand-alone heroine.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"The Missing" is as close to a feminist movie as can be telling a story that engrosses on the traditional level of the Western without offending warring cultural factions. Cate Blanchette plays a frontier single mom and local healer, whose teenage daughter is abducted by Apaches and army deserters to sell for prostitution in Mexico.

"Bad Santa" is the baddest satire of the Christmas spirit you will ever see.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

"Bad Santa" is the baddest satire of the Christmas spirit you will ever see. In contrast, visit "Love Actually" for a standard and amiable tribute to the spirit of love we all cling to at that season. "Santa" stars Billy Bob Thornton as a dissolute, drunken, foul-mouthed, cynical thief who gains entrance to store safes by playing Santa with his little-person cohort played by Tony Cox.

It's an offbeat film with style.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The 1984 "Singing Detective" miniseries had Michael Gambon as a misanthropic novelist confusing himself with his pulp-fiction noir detective. Although no one could approach Gambon's startling portrayal, no actor I see can match Robert Downey Jr.'s ability to bring back this character with his own demons to recreate hallucinations and '50's musicals in dreams lurid, colorful, and downright Freudian.

This almost too-serious drama works on several levels, maybe one or two too many.

By John DeSando, WCBE's

It has literary elements but is also a good sea yarn without them.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Peter Weir has a penchant for the weird: "A Picnic at Hanging Rock" drips with symbolism and sex and remains my favorite Australian film of the '70's; "Truman Story" leans heavily on allegory about media control. His new "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," starring Russell Crowe, has literary elements but is also a good sea yarn without them.

Revolutions could work...if you went into an editing room, and fused all three Matrix films together into one big eight-hour megamovie.

By Dan Mushalko & Michael A.J. Randolph

The Matrix: Revolutions is hardly revolutionary. It's merely the latest installment in a trilogy of movies that started off innovative and electrifying, but ended up repetitive and fizzling with static discharge.

I vote "Bubba Ho-tep" the most imaginatively accessible film of 2003.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

I vote "Bubba Ho-tep" the most imaginatively accessible film of 2003. Elvis living in a nursing home with JFK, transformed into an elderly black rebel, is the embodiment of cultural detritus, a king in exile stripped of his fame and fortune. These 2 icons of the 20th century battle an Egyptian soul-sucking mummy literally for the souls of humanity.

Hugh Grant's prime minister proves to the world that "love is all around."

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Those who long to be in touch with poetic icons of the last century will welcome whatever bits of insight it gives.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time

"Sylvia" is an engaging biopic of poet Sylvia Plath's emotional juggernaut marriage to poet Ted Hughes. It reminds me of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in the also emotionally rich "Frida." But in neither case do we ever get an understanding of how the artists actually construct their art from their minds and their lives. Perhaps that exploration can never be done in film.

Audiences should leave feeling betrayed by a crass indulgence in video-game vulgarity.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

The film has nothing but characters, and that is all it needs.

By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time"

Peter Dinklage will lose an Oscar to Bill Murray or Sean Penn this year, but his role as introverted dwarf Finbar McBride addicted to trains is going to be a winner in my heart just as the film was at Sundance. Tom McCarthy's "Station Agent" is a career-defining role for Dinklage.