Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years is a two-hander about aging that refuses to walk the generally prescribed paths of shedding sentiment and/or dwelling on disease, and for that alone, it deserves hardy praise. On the eve of a couple’s 45th anniversary, news arrives of the discovery of a body found …
Hard-boiled private-eye hokum, with a wire crossed into the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, resulting in a major power outage at the end, after getting by on dim bulbs till then. A black-garbed, bearded, be-ringed, pointed-fingernailed mystery man named Louis Cyphre (equals "Lucifer," get it?) hires a wisecracking Brooklyn gumshoe named Angel ("Of …
Futuristic thriller wherein a world-weary mercenary escorts an angelic nymph of indeterminate powers, and for unknown purposes, from a Mongolian convent to New York City. The hyperkinetic camera and overinflated action create the wrong climate for the apocalyptic solemnity. With Vin Diesel, Melanie Thierry, Michelle Yeoh, Gerard Depardieu, Charlotte Rampling, …
Sharon Stone, pushing fifty, takes her femme fatale act to London, along with her sandblasted face and helium-inflated boobs. There is an exculpatory spirit of self-parody in it, but then there already was, in the 1992 predecessor. The thing about any sort of parody, self- or otherwise, is that it …
Leave it to Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delight, Basic Instinct) to set an erotic thriller inside a convent. Don’t let the bird poop and fart jokes that open the picture throw you. It’s his way of distracting audiences from the corporeal abominations that await. Verhoeven’s role in this fact-based 17th Century …
Visconti's horrendous dredging up of the Nazi nightmare begins inside a blast furnace, and for nearly three hours thereafter, his vision of human depravity rages like a fever. It's open to question whether Visconti was very interested in Naziism as a historical fact, or whether he was merely interested in …
Shaky suspense film premised on a mousy accountant tumbling into an exclusive Manhattan sex club, anonymous one-nighters with uniformly beautiful career women: “It’s intimacy without intricacy.” Shakier as it goes. With Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Natasha Henstridge, and Charlotte Rampling; directed by Marcel Langenegger.
Fine costume piece. Well, the costumes anyhow are fine. The piece as a whole is only fairish, a predigested potage of 18th-century sexism, blueblood cold-bloodedness, paramours, bastards, the mandatory male heir, all of it “based on a true story.” Rachel Portman’s music, much more than Saul Dibb’s direction, creates the …
When André, 85, has a stroke, Emmanuelle hurries to her father's bedside. Sick and half-paralyzed in his hospital bed, he asks Emmanuelle to help him end his life. But how can you honor such a request when it's your own father? Directed by François Ozon, starring Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, …
Old-style, meticulously plotted and paced private-eye case steers perilously close to parody (Robert Mitchum's wry first-person narration, the bluesy horn solo on the soundtrack, Charlotte Rampling's Bacall impersonation). But Dick Richards's steady-handed direction holds it to a course so straight and sure that it achieves instead a kind of fundamentalist …
Very professional, very proficient job by Laurent Cantet, director of Time Out , who here details the activities of lonely, middle-aged, largely American women (the vulnerable Karen Young and steely Charlotte Rampling, most prominently) at a Haitian resort in the Baby Doc era, enjoying the easy but not free companionship …
If only the whole thing were as good as its credits sequence: a roving spotlight carving out white crescents on a black screen, picking out retro Forties lettering in a film noir font. It sets a mood; the movie doesn't sustain it. A second collaboration between the star and the …
Todd Solondz has described this as a “quasi-sequel” to Happiness, a helpful description inasmuch as a dozen years have passed since the quasi-predecessor, and inasmuch as the moviegoer’s memory receives no help whatsoever from the recasting of the principal roles with different players: Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, and …