Something more for the Catholic Church to endure: a crusading exposé of the workhouses for "fallen women" run by Irish nuns. (Laundries, more exactly, but that can't justify the washed-out color.) Set in the mid-1960s, it follows three girls into captivity: a rape victim (in a well-staged opening scene at …
Coming out of the closet in a house of Italian immigrants in French Canada. Based on a play, and presumably on experience, by Steve Galluccio, but as telegraphed, as shouted, as blared, as a TV sitcom. With Luke Kirby, Ginette Reno, Paul Sorvino, Claudia Ferri, and Peter Miller; directed by …
Depressingly low-ambition action film about a muscle-bound DEA agent on the trail of revenge for the cross-fire murder of his wife. Or more realistically, about Vin Diesel on the trail of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, take your pick. (The bass tones and the …
An attractive cast in a proletarian romantic comedy about a Porto Alegre copy-machine operator, and would-be cartoonist, with a major crush on a neighbor whom he watches through a pair of binoculars. "No girl," he confides in voice-over, "dreams of spending her life with a photocopier operator." Writer-director Jorge Furtado …
Star-studded cast in a dim, disjointed, desultory satire about an over-the-hill folkie named Jack Fate, tabbed to headline a benefit concert in an ill-defined police state. Bob Dylan, besides playing the lead, co-wrote (with director Larry Charles) the self-referential script, but his assorted cryptic and gnomic comments provide little illumination. …
The first screen incarnation of Lucky Jack Aubrey, hero of Patrick O'Brian's loved and admired series of historical adventure novels, captain of the British man-of-war, the HMS Surprise. This is preeminently a boys' story, and as pure and innocent a specimen as you are apt to find anymore, uncorrupted by …
Nicolas Cage is let off the leash to play a tic-infested con artist with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, a phobia for dirt and the outdoors, a mania for canned tuna. Frisking and frolicking to keep pace are Alison Lohman as the teenage daughter he never knew he had, and Sam Rockwell …
Will Zion fall to the Sentinels? Is the Oracle to be believed? Can the Keymaker be found? And how many times will the Architect contrive to use the word "ergo" in a single scene? And, when faced with the Lady-or-Tiger dilemma of saving Carrie-Anne Moss or the entire human race, …
Will Zion fall to the Sentinels? Is the Oracle to be believed? Can the Keymaker be found? And how many times will the Architect contrive to use the word "ergo" in a single scene? And, when faced with the Lady-or-Tiger dilemma of saving Carrie-Anne Moss or the entire human race, …
Everything that has a beginning has an end -- so speaks the Oracle. And surely that's the most encouraging word, the most energizing word, the most fortifying word, in the third and final installment of the Wachowski Brothers' man-versus-machine trilogy. (Or "tril," as you may prefer to call it, taking …
Everything that has a beginning has an end -- so speaks the Oracle. And surely that's the most encouraging word, the most energizing word, the most fortifying word, in the third and final installment of the Wachowski Brothers' man-versus-machine trilogy. (Or "tril," as you may prefer to call it, taking …
"The Holy Grail of Eastern mythology" grants Jackie Chan a second life after drowning, in addition to superpowers even more super than his normal ones. British comedian Lee Evans bests him in the humor department, however, and the movie as a whole drains away between its widely separated moods. As …
Christopher Guest and his repertory group turn their "mockumentary" style -- a style of expedience at best -- to a reunion of Sixties folkies for a live concert on public television. There's a peppy New Christy Minstrels-like nonet known as the Main Street Singers (led by the well-scrubbed faces of …