Effective kidnap thriller, even if some of its effect is achieved by cheating. And even if, too, some of the effect is subjected to insufficient elucidation. And even if, in any case, the total effect is cheap and empty. For all that, once we get over the rocky start (the …
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. …
Unctuous liberalism and clumsy manipulation on the broad subject of illegal aliens: Mexican, Australian, Iranian, Korean, Nigerian, the whole rainbow, in multiple plotlines with a Crash-like incidence of coincidence. (The physical beauty of the female aliens helps, of course, to fuel liberality.) Embarrassment eclipses enlightenment. Harrison Ford, Cliff Curtis, Ray …
Modernized biography of songwriter Cole Porter, digging up all the bisexuality that Night and Day in 1946 could not go near. Despite the theatrical device of reviewing his life as a musical show emceed by the Grim Reaper, it remains a rather banal backstage story, lacking much in the way …
The title alone told you that you needed to read no further in the Rebecca Wells novel. But the screen version, written and directed by Callie Khouri, temptingly makes room for one of our premier performers, Ellen Burstyn, in addition to Fionnula Flanagan, Maggie Smith, and Shirley Knight, troupers one …
A tale of a tail. The dolphin is Winter, a sea critter that lost its tail in a crab trap, was rescued by humans, then fitted with a prosthetic for use in its new Florida home. Charles Martin Smith (the actor from American Graffiti and Never Cry Wolf) directed with …
A wronged-woman thriller in which the flattery of the heroine reaches such nauseating heights as to call into question its sincerity. (The once-in-a-million-lifetimes event of driving an automobile off a moving ferry into the bay, while one hand is cuffed to the door handle and the other is fending off …
The strange, twisted, incomprehensible bond between a female serial killer (who had traumatically lost her father) and a high-tech detective (who had traumatically lost his daughter). Gimmicky thriller -- souvenir snow globes to mark every change of scene, ghostly visitations from the vanished daughter, guardian-angel symbols, computer graphics galore -- …
Belated contribution to Fridamania. The same-named 1984 film by Paul Leduc, while timelier, was too low-profile to discourage additional spotlight-seekers and altar-worshippers. So now we have a new chiselled Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), an almost Manneristically elongated one, to grace the cover of the paperback reprint of Hayden Herrera's definitive …
Belated contribution to Fridamania. The same-named 1984 film by Paul Leduc, while timelier, was too low-profile to discourage additional spotlight-seekers and altar-worshippers. So now we have a new chiselled Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), an almost Manneristically elongated one, to grace the cover of the paperback reprint of Hayden Herrera's definitive …
An ambitious, even overambitious, game of cops and robbers, fitted by rolling pin into the time-frame of Monday Night Football, a shade under three hours. Writer-director Michael Mann wants to have his opposing game players two opposite ways — as existential archetypes and as multi-dimensional humans — and the transitions …
Ashley Judd, under a blanket of makeup, stops making cute faces and starts making other kinds of faces after her picture-perfect husband (Jim Caviezel) is hauled before a court-martial for the long-ago massacre of nine civilians in El Salvador. Seeing as she's a hot-shot Bay Area attorney, she elects to …
Slimy suspense film about the hunt for a homicidal sex fiend with a harem of shanghaied women in a Durham dungeon. It wants only to make your skin crawl. It wants it so badly, so pantingly, so droolingly, that it makes your skin crawl for that reason alone. With Morgan …
Small-bore independent film, underfunded, grainy, timidly acted, about a Tennessee refugee (Ashley Judd, an American Julie Delpy, young, fresh, inexpressive) who lights in Florida to begin her adult life, and to pen a voice-over daily diary in order to make up for the shortcomings of the actress: "So far, fun …