Restoration period piece. Charles II of England (John Malkovich in a false nose) beseeches the Second Earl of Rochester (a rock-starry Johnny Depp) to quit wasting his energies on debauchery and to put them into becoming the king's Shakespeare: "Give me a major work of literature." What the sovereign is …
Cozy character piece, against a backdrop of Buenos Aires in economic meltdown, about the relationship of a gentlewoman of reduced means and her loyal unpaid maid. A big performance from Norma Aleandro, to go with her big hair, and a self-contained performance from Norma Argentina. Written and directed by Jorge …
Three listless storylines, intercut for a semblance of kineticism, are cleverly set at one-year intervals, 1999 through 2001, in separate corners of North Carolina. (Writer-director Tim Kirkman is a native North Carolinian.) Kip Pardue, an HIV-positive pretty boy, devotes his remaining days to saving the turtles at Kure Beach. Tess …
Dumbing-down of Robert Aldrich's 1974 prison-cum-football film, the Sadistic Guards versus the Avenging Convicts, not one of Aldrich's smarter ideas to begin with. (It's now the ESPN era, and the game is broadcast on national television.) Burt Reynolds, the star of the original, is given a token role and his …
Overly verbal, narration-heavy elucidation of the world of an illicit arms dealer. It's no help that the narrator and arms dealer is a smug cynic who chews our ears off for a full two hours: "By the mid-Eighties, my weapons were represented in eight out of the world's top ten …
Buddy film "inspired by a true story" as well as by Stacy Peralta's documentary of a few years previous, Dogtown and Z-Boys, detailing the exploits of the skateboarding pioneers of Venice, Ca., in the mid-Seventies. (Peralta, one of those pioneers himself, wrote the screenplay for this re-enactment, preserving the immortal …
In his directorial debut, Andy Garcia conjures the city of his birth, the city of his infancy, Havana in transition between Batista and Castro. A labor of love, presumably, but laborious positively, a limp epic of flat, underlit visuals and sententious, pretentious dialogue. "Havana is no longer a capital city, …
The course of romance commences seven years ago, with anonymous mutual enrollment in the mile-high club in the lavatory of an LAX-to-JFK red-eye, and it proceeds from there in fits and starts, after progressively diminishing intermissions (three years, two, one, one-half), without either party ever really getting to know the …
Four escapees from the Central Park Zoo -- a lion, a zebra, a hippo, and a giraffe -- are packed up and, in fulfillment of the tenth-birthday wish of the zebra, shipped back to the wild: "the live-in-a-mudhut-wipe-yourself-with-a-leaf wild," in the less sanguine view of the lion. ("They are just …
Marilyn Agrelo's documentary on New York City fifth-graders who've been channeled into the stay-off-the-streets-and-stay-out-of-trouble activity of competitive ballroom dancing: "I see them turning into these ladies and gentlemen," one teacher manages to say while fighting back tears. We follow three disparate classes (only one of which will make it through …
Spanish filmmaker Manuel Martín Cuenca, following the narrative pattern of a TV soap opera, braids together, in modern Madrid, some proverbial lives of quiet desperation: an expatriate Cuban smuggler, a crippled unfaithful wife, an ex-con chess master and his bartending former cellmate, an overworked social worker and her teenage Oblomov …
Preprogrammed comedy of a stiff-necked Texas Ranger charged with safeguarding five witnesses to homicide, a Texas Longhorns cheerleading squad. (He confiscates their cellphones, implements a dress code, shops for Tampax, gets advice on dating, grooming, and relating to his daughter.) Tommy Lee Jones, displaying a murderous deadpan, would be the …
Smarty-pants comedy-thriller written and directed by Richard Shepard. Pierce Brosnan, producer and star, further purges himself of James Bond (if The Tailor from Panama didn't do the trick) in his garish portrayal of "a facilitator of fatalities" who befriends a timid American businessman on a job in Mexico: "For an …
Didactic illustration, by Woody Allen, of the role of luck in human affairs, taking as its central metaphor a ball clipping the top of the net in a game of tennis, freeze-framed indecisively in midair. The story traces the progress of a lowborn Irish tennis pro (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), not quite …
Quirky comedy, without question, but quirkiness these days is no scarcer than shark's teeth, and it becomes necessary to distinguish between the pointlessly quirky and the pointedly. The issue still teeters in the balance when, for instance, a scraggly, trashy-looking white male, kicked out of the house by his black …