Outlandish and unruly even by Almodóvar's standards, with consequently a higher-than-usual percentage of misses than hits. Who but Almodóvar would believe that a little girl's Carrie-type telekinesis could be stuck in as just a throwaway gag? Who but Almodóvar could be so mistaken? With Carmen Maura.
Euphemism for when father was rounded up and shipped off for Party disloyalty in postwar Yugoslavia. This slice of Stalinist life, concerned mainly with the coming-of-age of the moon-faced youngest son, who brings to mind the boy in Bicycle Thief, is schmaltzy, modest, earnest, earthy -- perhaps not as often …
Taylor Hackford's Cold War fable, made well outside the spirit of detente, tells of a star Soviet ballet dancer and celebrated defector who has the bad luck to be aboard a Japan-bound jetliner that crash-lands behind the Iron Curtain and the good luck to be put in the care of …
Peter Weir takes up his interest in Culture Clash and sets it down in modern-day Pennsylvania, where the Amish community assumes the "primitive" role previously filled by Australian Aborigines. It is not necessary to know a people intimately in order to satisfy Weir's curiosity. The early scenes, of a horse-drawn …
A sort of Chinese Godfather, set in New York's Chinatown. In the interest of cultural documentation, there is a lot of laboriously expository dialogue played in the snappy, snappish manner of a Sidney Lumet movie, a Serpico or a Prince of the City. But we are not given nearly enough …
A movie every bit as peculiar as its title, from British avant-gardist Peter Greenaway. It is a gorgeous thing to look at, beautifully lit and colored and composed. (The photography is by the distinguished Sacha Vierny, of Belle de Jour, Muriel, Last Year at Marienbad, to name a few.) All …