Another head-in-hands contemplation of Kids These Days: a teenage revenge tale, written and directed by newcomer Jacob Aaron Estes, wherein a chubby middle-school bully gets lured into an ambush and takes worse punishment than planned. The kids -- the bully, his whipping boy, a girl their own age, and three …
A home-schooled teenager, raised in the wilds of Africa, is let loose as an innocent in the American public school system, and the worn-out subject of adolescent cattiness and bitchery receives an infusion of fresh blood, or at any rate a megadose of caffeine. The snap-crackle-pop script (from a book …
A home-schooled teenager, raised in the wilds of Africa, is let loose as an innocent in the American public school system, and the worn-out subject of adolescent cattiness and bitchery receives an infusion of fresh blood, or at any rate a megadose of caffeine. The snap-crackle-pop script (from a book …
Twenty-five, thirty years earlier, a cast of Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand would have tilted the earth's axis. Nowadays they -- or at any rate Hoffman and Streisand, pickups for the sequel to Meet the Parents, as the hippie-dippy, touchie-feelie, loosey-goosey parents of the groom-to-be -- are …
Slick piece of commercial filmmaking from Belgium, if the Flemish doesn't blind you, or rather deafen you, to the commercialism. The dark-and-stormy-night opening -- a stealthy approach to the exterior of a sedate apartment building, an unsettling scene of a father selling his underage daughter as a prostitute -- is …
You'd never guess, from the weight of the thing, that this is one of Shakespeare's comedies -- unless maybe by the device of the woman-disguised-as-a-man and fooling her own husband. Further, the naturalistic acting (faltering delivery, sotto voce, peppered with pauses), the cut-aways to authentic Venice locales, and the drowning-out …
It would have been understandable if, after the exertions of Mystic River, Clint Eastwood were to revert to the relaxation mode of Blood Work, Space Cowboys, True Crime, Absolute Power. For a while, it would appear he had done just that. This sets up as a nice, light workout of …
Ousmane Sembene's agitprop protest of the Islamic "purification" ritual -- clitoridectomy -- in a modern-day African village. Fine sense of place -- the colors, the light, the sounds, the daily activities. Slow-moving, stiff-moving narrative (nonetheless horrifying) and amateurish performances -- not all, but many. Fatoumata Coulibaly, Fatoumata Coulibaly, Maïmouna Hélène …
Post-menopausal romance (it might as aptly have been titled The Grandmother) centered around a brand-new widow, a self-described "shapeless old lump," who warms up to her son's hunky, hairy handyman and her daughter's married boyfriend (one and the same man) and warms him up in turn: "I thought nobody would …
Mythologizing biopic on the critical year of 1952 in the life of Che Guevara, before he was Che, when he was still just a med student called "Ernestito," embarking with his biochemist best friend on a road trip from his native Argentina, up the entire west coast of South America, …
Young love relived in the old folks' home: James Garner, every day, reads to a memory-impaired Gena Rowlands the story of a different-worlds romance ("It was an improbable romance. He was a country boy, she was from the city"), the story -- you guessed it -- of their own romance …
A catchy name for a movie, but not a name that fits its owner: the nerd of nerds at Preston High in podunk Idaho, a misfit for much more than just his name. Sporting a tumbleweed of kinky blond hair atop his gangly slope-shouldered frame, breathing through a troutlike open …