A blown-up SNL skit, but at eighty-odd minutes not blown up too big, centered around a couple of "disco dicks" -- dweeby brothers with matching clothes and synchronized movements -- who are so used to rejection that when they don't get it, they don't know what to do next. That …
Ole Bornedal's American re-do of his own Danish thriller about a necrophiliac serial killer and the hapless morgue attendant who falls under suspicion. In this, Bornedal is following the route of the Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer and The Vanishing, except that as the Bornedal original went uncirculated in America, the …
An itsy-bitsy independent film of unabating banality. Writer-director-actor Edward Burns, a media darling after The Brothers McMullen, yesterday's news after She's the One, presumes here to deal in plain truths about common folk, with support on the soundtrack from such introspective and in-touch spokespersons as Bruce Springsteen ("Oh, oh, oh, …
A funny-how-things-turn-out relationship comedy. The situation is slow to set up -- the pregnant Brooklyn social worker wants to raise her child with her gay-guy roommate rather than her live-apart boyfriend -- and the shortsighted characters are slow to think through the consequences. The natural complications are not, in the …
Oscar and Felix, who have not seen one another in seventeen years and have not been seen in a movie theater in thirty, get back together again, not in the same apartment, but in the same automobile, on the road to the wedding of Oscar's son and Felix's daughter. Walter …
The title doesn't tell the half of it. Not the eighth of it. One clean cop. One caring cop. One sensitive cop. One courageous cop. One diligent cop. One rules-bending cop. One results-getting cop. One unappreciated cop. One sexually magnetic cop. And all one and the same cop, you understand. …
Carl Franklin's screen version of the Anna Quindlen novel -- careerist feminist daughter obliged to move back home to nurse her happy-housewife mother through the final stages of cancer -- does not escape the TV-movie-disease-of-the-week syndrome. Neither does it escape a certain schematicism in its treatment of women's issues, mother …
The handsome face of a successful skirt-chaser is ruined in a car wreck, then restored. Or is this, or any part of it, a dream? Is it reality or is it virtual reality? Is it fiction or science fiction? (Quotable line: "Don't think about it anymore, or you'll go crazy.") …
Aggressively offbeat comedy about a runaway teen (Christina Ricci) and the people into whose lives she brings a few storm clouds, chiefly her homosexual half-brother, his bisexual lover, and their embittered spinsterish neighbor. The tough-talk narration of the central character ("I don't have a heart of gold, and I don't …
Lazy, lowbrow, bumpkinish comedy about a moronic Mormon missionary in Los Angeles who knocks on the door of a porno producer in mid-shoot, and is put in front of the camera as a Triple-X superhero specializing in interrupting coitus. Director-star Trey Parker, one of the co-creators of the South Park …
Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel falls compliantly in line with the post-Get Shorty view of the author as a fashion plate of the hip, the flip, the cool, the edgy. The result: a cops-and-robbers game that sacrifices logic and suspense for snigger and swagger. In the process, …
Multicharacters heading in multidirections under the black Southwestern sky, with fairly even distribution of uninterest. Robert Forster gives off some warmth as a lonesome trucker, and Penelope Ann Miller shows enthusiasm as a sometime stripper, and bluesman Taj Mahal lays out his kind of music as a renegade deejay on …
Comfortable smelly old shoe. A disillusioned investigative reporter and first-person narrator ("There's nothing worse than a writer who doesn't have anything to say. Well, that's me"), a couple of hot dames (one underage: the authoritative Chloe Sevigny), a phoney kidnap scheme, a double-cross, a couple of surprise twists. The serious-minded …
Because the memory of the 1961 version starring Hayley Mills had already been sullied with three made-for-television sequels, we cannot very well pretend that the memory of it has now been sullied by Nancy Meyers's remake. The memory of the 1961 version was not exactly of polished gold anyway. The …
Because the memory of the 1961 version starring Hayley Mills had already been sullied with three made-for-television sequels, we cannot very well pretend that the memory of it has now been sullied by Nancy Meyers's remake. The memory of the 1961 version was not exactly of polished gold anyway. The …