
The Aeronauts
The thrill of The Aeronauts lies in its death-defying stunts.
The thrill of The Aeronauts lies in its death-defying stunts.
This documentary about a family-owned private ambulance service in Mexico City is one of the great modern films about night in the city.
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An article about the screening of Horace Jenkins' "Cane River" on Friday, November 1st, at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An FFC on Gavin Hood's Official Secrets.
A celebration of Yasujiro Ozu, as written by a Far Flung Correspondent from Egypt.
An article about Chicago native Verdine White, and Earth, Wind & Fire receiving the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, December 8th.
A review of the EA game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
In the computer business, they call it vaporware: software that is announced, advertised and even sold, but that never quite exists. Maybe in the movie business we could coin the term vaporfilm, for movies that zip right through our brains without hitting any memory molecules.
"Summer School" is a movie like that, a comedy so listless, leisurely and unspirited that it was an act of the will for me to care about it, even while I was watching it. This movie has no particular reason for being, other than to supply employment for people whose job possibilities will not be enhanced by it.
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"Summer School" stars Mark Harmon, an actor with some respectable credentials, as a high school teacher who gets stuck with summer school. The misfits in his class all have been sentenced to a summer of remedial English, and his job is to teach them, whether he likes them or not. They're lazy, rebellious, cretinous louts, so Harmon does what any teacher would do: He lowers himself to their level and shamelessly offers them bribes for attending class.
It's obligatory in these movies that you have representatives of the basic types of movie teenagers. We need the creep, the nerd, the jock, the pregnant girl, the sexpot, the shy one, the sleepy one and so on. One of each is represented in "Summer School," all of them equally forgettable.
Some so-called love interest is provided by Kirstie Alley as the sexy teacher down the hallway. She and Harmon perform the basic romantic three-step from Screenwriting 101: (1) She can't stand him; (2) she learns to accept him, and (3) they fall in love. It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.
The movie contains: practical jokes, field trips, rebellion, acceptance, evil principals, absent girlfriends, a birth, a scene involving lots of special-effects makeup, a display of total teaching ineptitude, and some very mild sex. It doesn't even have the nerve to be vulgar, to be the kind of mass trash that the ads promise. It's a vaporfilm. You see it, you leave the theater, and then it evaporates, leaving just a slight residue, something like a vaguely unpleasant taste in the memory.
An early review of Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell out of AFI Fest.
A Far Flung Correspondent weighs in on the MCU controversy.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...