Existential pulp thriller from the canon of Jim Thompson, the sort of marginal but not negligible talent so useful in forming a cult, especially in a foreign country, especially France. The novels for the most part don't date well, and this adaptation by James Foley often seems anachronistically stilted. Jason …
Two far-apart married couples in Montreal, a middle-aged one composed of a randy handyman and a boozy former B-movie actress (Nick Nolte, Julie Christie) and a yuppie one composed of a sexually ambiguous workaholic and a child-craving housewife (Jonny Lee Miller, Lara Flynn Boyle), switch partners through the sheerest coincidence …
Collective New York phobias -- fear of involvement, fear of strangers, fear of break-ins -- are enacted by way of a comic nightmare in which an Upper East Side word processor, lured by the prospect of a hot date, gets marooned in SoHo without a dime (well, actually with ninety-seven …
Fit-for-TV digital documentary on a bushelful of ex-convicts exonerated through DNA evidence after five, ten, twenty, twenty-five years behind bars. The people are interesting to meet, and their stories, although a little one-note, healthily undermine our faith in the justice system. Directed by Jessica Sanders.
Japanese travellers to the Next World are detained in a nondescript institutional facility -- a mundane Purgatory -- where they must select one (and only one) memory from their lives to carry with them into eternity. A shaky premise (only one?) is shaken further by the prosaic documentary treatment: talking-heads …
Few people can be put out with Ingmar Bergman for having not kept his promise that Fanny and Alexander would remain his last movie. Still, Bergman has felt obliged to argue, with perhaps an overrefined sense of integrity, that inasmuch as After the Rehearsal was made originally for Swedish television, …
Rhinestone heist thriller (a brandished DVD of To Catch a Thief establishes a standard of comparison) about a couple of high-tech jewel thieves in smug retirement in the Islands: "Now the challenge is to find joy in simple things." But then the third of the priceless Napoleon Diamonds, of which …
The remake of Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past needn't detain anyone longer than to diagnose it as part of the Hollywood grave-robbing epidemic, and to paint a large red cross outside the theater door. What would seem to have been an untransportable Forties storyline has, as in Body Heat, …
Not too glossy or glossed-over a portrait of Jackie Kallen (a hoarse, coarse, brassy, sassy Meg Ryan), a woman in a man's game, manager of a prizefighter whom she discovered in a brawl with two crackheads: "Reminds me of Marvin Hagler." Not too believable a portrait, nevertheless. Charles S. Dutton, …
Vapid paranoid thriller about mind-control through TV commercials. Surely the ad business, to say nothing of this movie, ought to be on guard against more pertinent and persistent evils than the insertion of subliminal political messages in TV spots for No Sweat anti-perspirant. The name of one of the bit …
Directorial miscasting: Martin Scorsese moves from the agitated, violent, profane turf of Mean Streets and Raging Bull into the genteel neighborhood of Edith Wharton, of "fine literature," and of the Manhattan haut monde of the 1870s. He answers the opening bell in his customary Smoking Joe fashion: rushing in, reeling …
Anjelica Huston devises her own personal solution to the shortage of parts for mature women: directing herself in the lead role of a widowed mother of seven, in Dublin circa the middle late Sixties. ("Seven children and" -- demonstrating her unfamiliarity with Masters and Johnson -- "not one organism to …
A young nun in a provincial Canadian cloister has given birth to a baby, soon found discarded in a waste basket. A true innocent, she may or may not have known she was pregnant, may or may not know who the father is, may or may not have strangled the …
Funereal toga party commemorating the culture clash in a majestic computer-generated Alexandria, pre-Islam: pagans, Christians, Jews. It is no surprise — although given the locale, and given the drift of current events in the region, it is an undoubted provocation — that the Christians, out from under the Roman sandal, …