In Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer Of Love (Universal), Nathalie Press plays a Yorkshire party girl saddled with a pious older brother (Paddy Considine) and a rich best friend (Emily Blunt) who toys with their affections. Pawlikowski tells their story well, but he's primarily concerned with setting a hazy, dreamy mood. The movie has the quality of an unplanned nap on a grassy hill. While the audience drifts off, every sensory input gets heightened: a bite into a croissant sounds like music, and the deep, rubbery snap of a blade of grass being pulled from the ground sounds like a skipping heartbeat…
The opportunity to remake one of the cheesiest horror films ever made would seem like a can't-miss proposition: After all, there's nowhere to go but up. Yet the Michael Bay-produced The Amityville Horror (Sony) treats the original with the kind of reverence that usually attends an august literary classic. Only the added J-horror tropes are a reminder that it was made in 2005…
Sydney Pollack's Three Days Of The Condor was one in a proud line of post-Watergate paranoid thrillers, so the promise of Pollack returning to the genre 30 years later sounded tantalizing, especially in these turbulent political times. But while it's well-crafted and sophisticated by today's debased standards, The Interpreter (Universal) lacks the urgency of the earlier film, and it touches on global terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other contemporary bugaboos with a disappointing absence of purpose…
If Hollywood instituted a rule whereby no actors-turned-directors could star in their own debut features, could there possibly be a downside? Not so far as David Duchovny's directorial debut House Of D (Lion's Gate) is concerned. For a film about a 12-year-old (Anton Yelchin) whose best friends are a 41-year-old "retard" (Robin Williams) and an incarcerated hooker (singer Erykah Badu), House Of D manages to earn a surprising number of points on charm and quirk, but every time Duchovny shows up to emote as the grown-up version of Yelchin, the film plummets into sticky-sweet self-indulgence…
Disney's official corporate motto should be "Why sell it to them once when you can gussy it up again and sell it to them again every five years?" Still, the dutifully gussied-up two-disc "Platinum Edition" of Cinderella is pretty tempting, with its collection of unused song demos and concept art on top of the restored animated classic itself.