Joan Chen's worlds-apart followup to her first film, Xiu Xiu, the Sent-Down Girl, brings together Richard Gere and Winona Ryder as the perfect couple: he'll never grow up, and she'll never grow old. (Peter Pan Complex and heart condition, respectively.) A cure is possible, for either or both, but not …
Australian stock-market thriller (if that's not an oxymoron): a lot of looking at computer screens, or at the faces of people looking at computer screens. The tricksy plotting is a little like David Mamet without the ear and without the rhythm. David Wenham, Anthony LaPaglia, Sibylla Budd; written and directed …
Mushrooming complications in the nuptial plans of a nonreligious Italian-Jewish girl and her WASP fiancé. One of the complications -- the father of the bride's unwitting involvement with the Mafia -- is not only irrelevant to the wedding but bumps it down to the status of a subplot. (Anthony LaPaglia, …
In burying her mother, small town pharmacist and 40-year-old spinster Ave Maria Mulligan (Ashley Judd), unearths a scandalous family secret. The brief documentary history of the titular Virginia town that opens novelist and first-time director Adriana Trigiani’s undoubting romantic comedy suggested something more than another serving of Fried Green Magnolias. …
Facetious hard-boiled romantic thriller about the percolating passion between an Angst-ridden celibate hitman, Anthony LaPaglia, and his fatalistic target, Mimi Rogers (amused, amusing). You can see the ending coming miles away, and you go slower and slower the closer you get. A couple of warmish woman-on-top sex bits. With Matt …
A modern-day Job -- he has lost his wife and unborn child, his house, his job, and although not his dog, at least his dog's left front leg -- and unless and until God gives him some answers to tough questions ("What kind of a God takes a dog's leg?"), …
Computer-animated message movie about the pressure of conformity and (separate message) the plunder of nature, more specifically about a species of pop-song-singing penguins, into whose midst is born a "different," an aberrant, tap-dancing penguin (try, if you can, to put the pudgy trudging birds of March of the Penguins out …
A romantic-comic Rashomon: first we get "his" angle on their affair, then "hers." The gimmick, even as applied to relationships, is not new (see André Cayatte's two-part Anatomy of a Marriage, see the TV movie Divorce His/Divorce Hers). What's new is that a man, Ken Kwapis, directed the first part; …
Tasteful, artful, generally faithful treatment of the Edith Wharton novel. If it naturally lacks the "personal" quality of Terence Davies's autobiographical work — Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes — it at least earns him credit for having selected a first-rate piece of literature. And it does …
Female vampire, French, gamine, Peter Pan coiffed, finicky in her tastes, takes advantage of a gang war to gorge her appetite (i.e., "eat Italian"). John Landis, back in the mood of his American Werewolf in London, turns out a movie of mild horror and milder humor (the fondness of Mafiosi …
Three sour marriages in the Land Down Under. Director Ray Lawrence and writer Andrew Bovell (whose screenplay is adapted from his own stage play) seem to be going for something deep, something fundamental about relationships. But the degree of coincidence in the multiple path-crossings surpasses the improbable. Eye-catching work from …
An Australian politician/absentee father (Anthony LaPaglia), afraid that news of his wife’s nervous breakdown leaking out will ruin his chances for re-election, throws the missus in a “looney bin” and hires an earthy, in-the-ozone hitchhiker (Toni Colette) and her attack dog to babysit his five hypochondriacal daughters. Finally, Uncle Buck …
Misnamed Australian romantic comedy -- the heroine's purple prose is explicitly between hard covers -- about the mating dance of a trashy writer and a tony jeweller. Plenty of surprise turns, and some unlikely sources of humor (a crippled leg, a gashed tongue), along with a lot of broad stretches …