Horny-teenager update at the end of the millennium. Four buddies form a pact to lose their virginity by prom night: "No longer will our penises be flaccid and unused!" Moments of tastelessness intrude on stretches of mere insipidness. Chris Klein and Natasha Lyonne can do better for themselves, and already …
Two engaging young actresses, Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall, in an unengaging, smug, heavy-handed, lead-footed satire set at a homosexual-deprogramming facility (girls wear pink, boys blue) called True Directions. With Cathy Moriarty, RuPaul Charles, Bud Cort, Mink Stole; directed by Jamie Babbit.
A nostalgic ramble down the road to a KISS concert (ca. 1978), in the bonehead-and-proud-of-it style of a heavy-metal music video. The unrelenting songtrack heightens the effect. (Co-founder of the band, Gene Simmons, co-produced the movie.) With Edward Furlong, Giuseppe Andrews, James DeBello, Sam Huntington, Natasha Lyonne, Melanie Lynskey, and …
One type of queen portrays another type of queen: Charles Busch, who adapted his own stage play, dolls himself up in drag to impersonate a faded Hollywood diva, in this salute to, or spoof of, the women's pictures of old. (The diva's husband, for contrast, is a Stanley Kramer-ish producer …
Tara Subkoff (All Over Me,The Cell) moves behind the camera to write and direct this based-on-true-events cult horror entry for IFC Midnight. After one of the zippiest title sequences in recent memory, six well-heeled twelve-year-old girls settle in for a sleepover in a mansion where “the vortex of the four …
Time-travel romance (or in the words of the whiz-kid Cupid who makes it happen, "a 4-D pretzel of kismetic inevitability") uniting a Type-A Manhattan career woman and a 19th-century British duke, who tumbles through a time-portal into the present day. The matching of Meg Ryan -- tossing around and peering …
A comedy of family shame, rooted in the personal experience of filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and accordingly set in 1976. The premise is full of potential, even if some of that potential is down the lower road of a weekly TV sitcom. A single dad, old enough to be regularly mistaken …
There is so much fact-fudging going on in The United States vs. Billie Holiday that for all the good it did screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, she could just as easily have fabricated a character out of whole cloth based on the life …