A Peter Greenaway erudition display, or in other words a film to bang your head against. Arch, artificial (and harshly recorded) talk of sex, death, money, religion, Fellini (hence the title), Mondrian, Austen, Hardy, etc., in flat, rigid, squared-up compositions, sometimes containing antiseptic nudes. The photography (the venerable Sacha Vierny …
A conscience-free cad (e.g., inventing a two-year-old son so as to cruise a single-parents support group for dates) is rescued from his self-absorption by a twelve-year-old misfit with a dotty mother. Conventional in form and sentiment, despite such a dark-comic bit as the dead duck in the park (slain by …
The embarrassments of having an ADD autistic brother when you’re trying to fit in at a new school: him running down the street in his undies and into a stranger’s house to use the toilet, him smearing poo on the rug, him popping your new girlfriend’s tampon into his mouth, …
Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Affleck get into a fender-bender on the FDR on their separate ways to the courthouse, the one to divorce court, the other to probate court. The first, an operatically repentant alcoholic, unable to drive away from the scene of the accident, loses custody of his …
Four temps form a square of friendship in a hostile office environment. Some well-observed minutiae, but the minutes do indeed crawl. Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Bob Balaban; directed by Jill Sprecher.
If you wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, what do you do for an encore? (Well, after a spin-off TV series, anyway.) How about this? A sex-change operation on Some Like It Hot: two airport lounge singers (sisters of the one in Anything but Love) witness a …
Writer and director Karen Moncrieff, of Blue Car, goes at the title figure -- not just dead, but brutally murdered -- by way of five separate storylines, one after another, some more tangential than others, all populated by horridly stunted humans. Structurally intriguing, but grindingly grim and condescending. With Toni …
In the fresh footprints of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, another Jane Austen adaptation. And in a word, it "delivers," in every bit as predictable a way as a Schwarzenegger action thriller. Or in a few other words, it meets but never exceeds expectations -- with the solitary exception of …
Two sisters try to win over their terminally ill, difficult-to-please aunt in hopes of becoming the beneficiaries of her wealthy estate, only to find the rest of their greedy family has the same idea. Starring Anna Faris and Toni Collette, directed by Dean Craig.
Was this remake necessary? A one-mile-square housing development situated in the middle of the Las Vegas desert is the setting for this digitized facelift of Tom Holland’s ho-hum 1985 cult-horror item. No one believes Anton Yelchin’s claim that neighbor Colin Farrell is a vampire and responsible for the death of …
A fairy tale for grownups? A grown-up fairy tale? Either way, don’t be fooled: the setting of writer-director Brett Haley’s father-daughter dramedy — a failing vinyl record store in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, with frequent stops at a local bar that stays in busi-ness thanks to its reputed “authenticity” — …
Oh, dear. Hector (Simon Pegg in deadly earnest) is an English psychiatrist, an affluent, middle-aged white guy afflicted with the dreaded "tidy, uncomplicated, satisfactory life," a man who, terrifyingly, "takes comfort in his predictable patterns." No wonder he can't help his patients. Happily, one of them is a psychic who …
Writer-director Ari Aster’s debut feature is not coy about its intentions: it opens on an obituary and then gives us mourning(?) daughter Toni Collette at her mother’s funeral, noting all the strange new faces present and also, oh yes, Mom’s “secret rituals.” (Some mention should be made of Collette’s go-for-broke …
No disrespect is meant in describing this as a consummate "women's picture." But inasmuch as the major-studio women's picture is practically a thing of the past, it will have to be a high-toned, high-flown one with illustrious literary connections. Two such connections, to be exact, the first to the Pulitzer …
Curtis Hanson's handling of the Jennifer Weiner book, lightly, mildly, breezily entertaining in a second-rate, best-sellerish, chick-lit kind of way: the seriocomic story of two mismatched Jewish sisters, one an overweight, high-achieving Philadelphia lawyer whose private life consists of romance novels and a shoe fetish, and the other a rootless …