Arts + Life

This is the best slow movie you will see all year.

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

The film is alive with change.

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

"X2" is about as perfect a science fiction feast made from comic-book ingredients as I could have hoped for.

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

No one who loves film should miss this inside story of a gifted director pursuing a losing cause.

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

J.K. Rowling said that Director Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits" was the inspiration for the Harry Potter series. Who is better to fail than such a visionary director? He already did with "Adventures of Baron Munchausen." But wait, he fails again with his incomplete "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote."

Just don't think "A's" mean "All's well."

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

Justin Lin, director of "Better Luck Tomorrow," wanted to make a film that "resisted the standard stories and stereotypes prevalent in America." He succeeded because this bold Asian-dominated film is not just about Asian Americans but more about rich Orange County high school seniors who use their credentials of "A's" to scam financial and peer advantages while descending to amorality: "Our straight A's were passports to freedom."

I just hope it is not too young in the year for everyone to remember this brilliant actress's Oscar-worthy performance.

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

What a handful of a movie!

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

What a handful of a movie! And I don't mean the dirt from the holes the juvenile delinquents dig as their irrational punishment "to build character" at Green Lake Camp detention center. Director Andrew Davis's ("The Fugitive") "Holes" is a pile of themes about loyalty, greed, interracial love, murder, revenge, suicide, and inheritance packed into an "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" desert Disney chaos for the young.

Nolte as a good actor? He is very good.

By John DeSando, WCBE's

In ?The Good Thief? Nick Nolte plays Bob Montagnet, a down-but-not-yet-out Bogie, a very bright thief, and a heroin addict. Natsa Kukshianidge's femme fatale, Anne, is a 17-year old Bacall. It's the south of France--Nice and Monaco-- and it's time to relieve Monte Carlo of some precious paintings.

"Nowhere" is definitely "somewhere."

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

"Nowhere in Africa" is not nearly as romantic as the film "Out of Africa" nor as cruel as J.M. Coetzee's novel "Disgrace." Let's just say it is not the melodramatic "The Gods Must Be Crazy" either. It is an absorbing drama of a Jewish family's flight from Germany in 1938 to Africa, where life exacts demands in the fields as well as the hearth, at a pace so finely tuned, it all seems terribly nice even at the worst of times.

Have confidence in these artists to make your day.

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

It's all so corny, so true, and so beautiful.

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

"Max" tries vainly to help us understand how a human being with art on his mind could become an unparalleled butcher.

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

While Einstein was wowing the world with his immortal formula, Adolf Hitler in Menno Meyjes' "Max" creates his own:"Art + Politics = Power." Hubris begins here, in a fiction that tries to posit some foundation for Hitler's malignant genius in his artistic longings.

This is one of those films that make a patient man of me and drive my plot-driven friends back to "Ahnold."

By John DeSando, WCBE's

"Desert Seinfeld," where it is really about nothing and nothing really happens. It's Gus Van Sant's "Gerry," not for Jerry Seinfeld, but for two young men, both named Gerry, who get lost while taking a hike on the "Wilderness Trail."

You'll never pass a booth or open your cell again without thinking about this slight but engrossing thriller.

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

The character development of gang leaders is remarkable, given their number and complexity, and cinematographer Cesar Charlones' almost-MTV quick cuts give a vitality necessary to depict the murder and mayhem of the poor but strong.

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

"The Hunted," starring Tommy Lee Jones and Benecio Del Toro, is neither sound nor merciful. It's all predictable and improbable, like logs piled on a blazing fire-intense and fleeting.

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

The Bard's Prospero exclaims, "Let them be hunted soundly! At this hour/Lies at my mercy all mine enemies!" William Friedkin's "The Hunted," starring Tommy Lee Jones and Benecio Del Toro, is neither sound nor merciful. It is filled with telegraphed, cliched action in the most unimaginative chase plot of the last year.

...something about Willis's world-weariness, his difficulty in countering commands even for the best of reasons, makes his portrayal unforgettable in the subtlest way.

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

It's a sweet film, no worse, no better than a bunch of other recent films hoping to catch the "My-Fat-Greek-Wedding" windfall, which is real money by the way.

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

The five bright, not shy Burton sisters and their writer mother, all from Central Ohio, have fashioned a modern fable in a lighthearted story of greed, guilt, and gratitude. They are promoting "Manna From Heaven" around the country themselves, leaving a wake of family stories at least as interesting as the film itself.

The sequence about the surreal science fiction film, where a miniaturized man enters his love's vagina, is as shocking and funny a sequence as you will see,...

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

Why won't this film make it big if I like it so much?

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