Sigourney Weaver Page 3

A-list director Ron Howard worked with the surviving Beatles to assemble this engaging documentary, which offers an inside look at Beatlemania, the three years when the best pop band in history toured the world. The messy title is a hint as to how compromised this film is: it's not a proper journalistic look at the band, but rather an approved portrait with the rough edges removed. But with its never-seen footage and lots of great music, it can't help but be hugely entertaining.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr spent years developing their sound before they hit the big time. And when they set off on their first tour in 1963, things immediately went crazy, with unprecedented displays of fan adoration. Fans couldn't get enough of these cheeky young guys from Liverpool, and their irreverent antics during interviews further endeared them to their audience. As they embarked on their first major tour of America, young journalist Larry Kane was sent to accompany them. Initially annoyed at this fluffy assignment, Kane was won over by their talent and the way they stood up to segregation laws in the South. But by 1966, they found that playing concerts in stadiums was simply too exhausting (they couldn't hear themselves above the screaming), so they abruptly stopped performing in public. The rest of their career took place in the studio.

All of this is recounted in a terrific range of home movies, archive footage, snapshots and interviews from the time, plus present-day recollections from Paul and Ringo. Added to this are interviews with celebrities who as children saw them perform, artists who worked with them and historians who examine their talent and impact. With access to this kind of material and a skilled editing team, Howard creates a film that's energetically gripping, offering a perspective on the Beatles that we may not have seen before.

Continue reading: The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years Review

It's been 13 years since the release of the Disney/Pixar hit Finding Nemo, and filmmaker Andrew Stanton has opted to make a spin-off instead of a direct sequel, shifting the perspective to recount the life story of the forgetful blue tang. Because it centres on a personal quest, it's a very different style of movie, which makes some of the action feel rather contrived. But the characters are still vivid and likeable, and it's packed with meaningful themes.

The film opens with young Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) being taught by her parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy) how to cope with her short-term memory problem. But she still gets lost. Then years later, after her adventure teaming up with Marlin (Albert Brooks) to help find his son Nemo (Hayden Rolence), she has a brief spark of memory and decides to find her family. Accompanied by Marlin and Nemo, Dory crosses the ocean to a California marine sanctuary, where they get separated. Dory gets help from cranky seven-tentacled Octopus Hank (Ed O'Neill), the perky whale shark Destiny (Kaitlin Olson) and a befuddled beluga whale (Ty Burrell). Meanwhile, Marlin and Nemo meet a pair of laddish sea lions (Idris Elba and Dominic West).

Continue reading: Finding Dory Review

Taking a break from her pre-med studies, Dana (Connolly) heads off to a mountain cabin with her flatmate Jules (Hutchison), their stoner pal Marty (Kranz) and Jules' muscle-jock boyfriend Curt (Hemsworth), who has invited his friend Holden (Williams) as a possible date for Dana. But they have no idea that two sardonic businessmen (Jenkins and Whitford) are managing an elaborate underground operation during which they are manipulating everything about the cabin. And it starts to become clear that, to save the world, all five young people must die in the correct order.

Continue reading: The Cabin In The Woods Review

Dave (Harrelson) is struggling to hold his fractured family together while covering up his dodgy activities as a cop in L.A.'s rough Rampart district. He lives with his two ex-wives (Heche and Nixon) and two daughters (Larson and Boyarsky), while developing a tentative relationship with a lawyer (Wright).

But his vigilante-style approach to his job leaves him with few friends, while his addiction to prescription drugs is sending him into a downward spiral. And now he's being harassed by the D.A. (Weaver) and her investigator (Ice Cube).

Continue reading: Rampart Review

Nathan (Lautner) is a lively Pittsburgh teen with even livelier parents (Isaacs and Bello), although he sees a shrink (Weaver) to keep his anger issues in check. While working on a school project with childhood crush Karen (Collins), he stumbles across a missing-child website with a picture of him at age 3.

Suddenly he doubts who he really is, and indeed he and Karen have uncovered a secret involving a foreign agent (Nyqvist) and a CIA boss (Molina) who are both desperate to get their hands on some important information.

Continue reading: Abduction Review

Right around the time Pixar Animation Studios released its fifth feature, Finding Nemo, conversation shifted from "Is it any good?" to "Just how amazing is it?" Quality was assumed, and rightfully so. The studio's creative directors helped redefine the animation genre with the Toy Story franchise, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc. Subsequent Pixar stories were measured against their predecessors and ranked accordingly.

Continue reading: WALL-E Review

Vivienne Freeman (Emily Hampshire), a young hitchhiker with more spirit than fear, enters a restaurant, scans it, and picks a man sitting alone to delight with her company. Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman), a laconic Englishman, barely tolerates the intrusion on his quiet privacy with a gabby adolescent and, after displaying what is, for him, considerable patience, rejects her suggestion to ride with him. He leaves, as alone as when he came in, and drives off.

Continue reading: Snow Cake Review

And just when you thought lowbrow humor couldn't be funny any more....

Continue reading: Galaxy Quest Review

I said "aims," of course. A Map of the World is deeply flawed yet still worth a look, especially if you're into grandiose, weepy, self-important dramas. And hey, who isn't?

Continue reading: A Map Of The World Review

All of Oscar Grubman's (Aaron Stanford) prep school friends - including best friend Charlie (Robert Iler of Sopranos fame) - tell him that he's a 40-year-old trapped in a 15-year-old's body. Instead of feeding on pop culture and pop music, Oscar spends his time quoting Voltaire and listening to opera. Think of him as a Max Fisher minus the bullshit. He strives to be cultured and sophisticated well beyond his years, and girls his age just don't cut the gouda.

Continue reading: Tadpole Review

Sachar's antihero is Stanley Yelnats IV (Shia LaBeouf), an affable but luckless teen who's accused of a crime he did not commit and ordered to serve his sentence at Camp Green Lake, a Texas labor camp that's neither green nor near any lake. Instead of archery and crafts, the inmates spend their days digging holes under the watchful eye of crusty Mr. Sir (Jon Voight). His boss, Warden Walker (Sigourney Weaver), seeks something of value under the camp and needs the boys to keep tunneling until the unidentified treasure is found.

Continue reading: Holes Review

Paulina (Weaver) begins to inexplicably break down after his arrival, going so far as to sneak out of the house and destroy Miranda's car. Only when she returns do we discover the shocking reason for this insanity. Paulina suspects Miranda was the doctor who tortured and raped her 15 years earlier: the doctor, she says, who played the Schubert composition "Death and the Maiden" while he applied his evil ministrations. Paulina then turns the tables, tying Miranda up, beating him, and holding an impromptu trial to get his confession to the deeds.

Continue reading: Death And The Maiden Review

Home from boarding school for Thanksgiving holiday with unruly hormones and a festering Oedipal jones for his 40-something stepmom, idiosyncratic 15-year-old Manhattan sophisticate Oscar Grubman is having a hard time coping with life.

Versed in the classics, a voracious reader of Voltaire, fluent in French and tortured by his own high expectations, he doesn't have much use for girls his own age -- even the ones that like him. But as he waits impatiently for some elusive perfect moment to reveal his desires to Dad's wife (Sigounrey Weaver), Oscar gets a little drunk one night and goes to bed with her lusty best friend (Bebe Neuwirth) instead.

Such is the framework for "Tadpole," the enticingly tart, oddball coming-of-age comedy that won helmer Gary Winick the Director's Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Continue reading: Tadpole Review

A rare kids' flick that engages youthful intellect and heart instead of patting youngsters on the head and spoon-feeding them stock anecdotes and tie-in toys, "Holes" is a fun family flick with a manifold plot about a smart, quiet teenager who gets the fate-fueled chance to reverse his family's hereditary bad luck.

It seems a curse was put the great-great-grandfather of curly-headed moppet Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBeouf), and the trickle-down effect has landed the kid at a parched, ghost-town-like juvenile rehabilitation center in West Texas -- ironically called Camp Green Lake -- for a crime he didn't commit.

The venomous Warden (Sigorney Weaver, delighting in the role's sneering, sinister qualities) has a strange idea for building character in her charges: the boys spend every single day digging five-foot-deep holes in the dry lakebed. Her policies are enforced by the Mr. Sir, a classically menacing, beer-bellied, bow-legged figure played by Jon Voight in a scene-stealing standout performance. Sporting a graying Elvis pompadour, a villain's pencil mustache, twitchy wild eyes, and a low-slung holster, he's the kind of baddie who makes you giggle while making your skin crawl too, as he squints in the faces of potential escapees and seethes that in the desert "the buzzards'll pick ya clean by the end of the third day."

Continue reading: Holes Review