SNL skit torturously stretched out and unrestrainedly pottied up. (A villain named von Cunth. Hence, “Fuck you, Cunth,” etc.) In the result, the original models (TV’s MacGyver primarily, but Rambo, Commando, and cousins) are invariably funnier than the spoof. Will Forte, Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, Val Kilmer, Powers Boothe; directed …
Co-writer and co-director Robert Rodriguez (writing with Álvaro Rodriguez, directing with Ethan Maniquis) makes a feature-length reality of the hypothetical little teaser trailer tucked into the overstuffed package of Grindhouse, a bad dream come true. If nothing else, it gives a nice big fat leading role to Danny Trejo, a …
Sally Hawkins squeezes her skinny bod and zippy charm into bouffant-haired Rita O’Grady, a shy Ford-plant worker who rallied her English, female colleagues (aided by a union steward, played by Bob Hoskins) to demand equal pay. Their daring, 1968 strike shook up Britain and Detroit. Although Nigel Cole’s movie forklifts …
Almost a French Brief Encounter, with (briefly) a train station. Quietly appealing Vincent Lindon is the construction worker with a fine wife (Aure Atika) and child, drawn to a lonely teacher. She (Sandrine Kiberlain) is what Westerns once called a “schoolmarm,” and the shy, pensive feelings build to her poignant …
The monotonous triumphs of a peasant lad plucked from his family in a Chinese village, sent to study ballet at the Beijing Arts Academy, sent again to America to guest with the Houston Ballet, where he experiences first love with an auburn-haired virgin and decides to defect (mild tension there), …
Fausta (Magaly Solier) has a pretty face made somber by poverty and pain, including rape and other horror in her family past. Claudia Llosa’s Peruvian debut feature, set mostly in a harsh Lima slum, shows this Lady of Constant Sorrow slowly emerging from spiritual trauma by way of music, flowers, …
A Bratt Family project, set in their native Mission District in San Francisco, written and directed by Peter Bratt and starring his better-known brother Benjamin as a recovering alcoholic ex-con, a leisure-time lowrider and full-time macho man, unable to accept that his straight-A son isn’t straight: “From now on, you’re …
Frugal s‑f road film, an American photographer chaperoning the boss’s daughter through the Infected Zone in Mexico, infected, that is, with giant tentacled things from outer space. A little stingy, more than just frugal, with the CGI creatures themselves, striving in their stead for a feeling of documentary vérité, achieving …
Passable soap opera passed off as high and heavy drama. Writer-director Rodrigo García, who charted nine different and differing women in Nine Lives, has here cut down to a mere three. The connection between two of them is immediately clear, mother and child, more exactly the biological mother who at …
Bookish cartoon, copiously narrated from J.R. Ackerley’s memoir of his “Alsatian bitch” and “ideal friend,” charmingly drawn in the style of a children’s picture book, jerkily animated. The flow of images, in the final reckoning, can’t keep pace with the flow of words. And be advised: inordinate interest in matters …
True crime, bizarre crime, a San Diego matricide committed with a prop sword from a regional production of a Greek tragedy. The perpetrator — the sole survivor of a white-water-rapids expedition in Peru — is an amalgam of oddities (pet flamingos, visions of God, a pseudonym of Farouk, etc.), and …
The Riverton Ripper, after a sixteen-year hiatus, strikes again. Has he returned or has he rather been reincarnated? Endangered teenagers in 3‑D, as if they weren’t sufficiently unlifelike already. With Max Thieriot, Emily Meade, and John Magaro; directed by Wes Craven.
The Riverton Ripper, after a sixteen-year hiatus, strikes again. Has he returned or has he rather been reincarnated? Endangered teenagers in 3‑D, as if they weren’t sufficiently unlifelike already. With Max Thieriot, Emily Meade, and John Magaro; directed by Wes Craven.