<P>"The Horse Whisperer" is less a movie than a model of a movie made from a kit: Shake the box and you can hear the symbols and scenery rattling around in there, ready to be pieced together in an attractive fashion. There's supposed to be a st…
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<P>The chief pleasure to be found in any version of Oscar Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest, is the dialogue, and Oliver Parker's re-interpretation is no different. All of the great lines are here: "The very essence of romance is un…
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<P>When "Sleuth" premiered last month at the Toronto Film Festival, a great many critics (including me), writing in advance about it sight unseen, described it as a "remake" of the 1972 film based on Anthony Shaffer's stage play. The festival p…
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<P>In this summer of sequel glut and computer-enhanced mayhem, Seabiscuit is a risky example of counterprogramming that just may lure an audience because it's so refreshingly unlike the competition. Based on Laura Hillenbrand's 2001 best-seller…
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<P>The idea of a high school basketball coach who benches the whole team for getting lousy grades -- as real-life coach Ken Carter, of Richmond, Calif., did in the late '90s -- sounds like a dream come true for manly-man cultural conservatives,…
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<P>In "The Last Emperor, a sweeping epic about Manchurian emperor Pu Yi, director Bernardo Bertolucci has an overwhelming task. And he comes so close to succeeding at it. </P>
<P>Bertolucci (with cowriter Mark Peploe) must show the lavish tra…
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<P>It begins with the trajectory of a speck. We watch as it floats through the jungle of Nool, a wisp of nothingness that's a self-contained planet in its own cosmos. It's a dot, on a clover. But as Theodore Geisel knew -- and any child will af…
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<P>Show people are different from you and me -- more high strung, more amusing, more devil-may-care -- but not, as István Szabó's resolute charmer "Being Julia" shows us, as different as we may think. </P>
<P>Annette Bening plays Julia Lamb…
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<P>A precocious piglet overcomes barnyard prejudices and his place in the food chain to become the world's first championship sheep hog in "Babe," a captivating comic allegory about daring to be different in the face of conformity. With its pop…
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<P>You can imagine the sense of glee producers Brian Robbins and Mike Tollin must have felt when they first heard the story of Ken Carter. A no-nonsense high-school basketball coach from Richmond, California, Carter became a national celebrity …
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<P>Admittedly, it's been about 35 years since I was reader of Dr. Seuss, but my memories of his books are that they're short and economical with words. Neither of those descriptions applies to this theatrical version of Horton Hears a Who!, whi…
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<P>During the 1940s, when ten-year-old kids asked their folks where they came from, they’d often hear, “From the stork, darling.” In the 1950s, the answer might have been “From Macy’s, sweetheart.” During the ’60s, a mom might reply, “O…
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