Alternative title: Pretension in the Desert. It's bearable until Michel Piccoli puts a pistol in his mouth. That's because few people on earth are as suavely assured as Piccoli in the presence of a camera, and because his character here, an artist tagging along with a regiment of Napoleon's army …
Purported factual tale of a late-blooming doctor who champions bedside manner above all else: clown nose, angel costume, novelty-shop glasses, funny voices, whatever will raise a smile from the afflicted. His ultimate dream: the Gesundheit Institute, dedicated to healing through humor. What stands in his way is the sourpuss dean …
Stomachable family film about an acrophobic parrot who can converse, not simply form words. The emphasis, in consequence, is on verbal comedy, but the natural movement and expressions of the bird are more entertaining than the wisecracks and the Joe Pesci dialect. With Tony Shalhoub, Gena Rowlands, Cheech Marin, Bruce …
A young shutterbug with a second-hand camera shoots his mixed-nuts family, friends, and neighbors in Baltimore, gets discovered by a Manhattan gallery dealer, gets a taste of the Big Apple (where he is toasted as "a teenage Weegee" and "a humane Diane Arbus"), gets a king-size tummy ache from it. …
The reworking of the old Frederick Knott damsel-in-distress stage play, Dial M for Murder, filmed originally (and in 3-D) by Alfred Hitchcock, is sufficient to qualify as too-many-cooks but not to qualify as genuine originality. Did the business with the key makes better sense in the 1954 film? (Why can't …
The confessional memoir of TV comedy writer Jerry Stahl, transferred to the screen by fledgling director David Veloz, is one of those cathartic substance-abuse stories that Hollywood likes to tell itself now and again, telling itself at the same time that this is a well-marked path to Dostoevskian depths. These …
Joanna Going has a great face for a horror film, but preferably for the part of a zombie, a vampire, a revenant, a sorceress, a Satanist, a somnambulist, not, as here, a garden-variety damsel in distress (politically correct damsel, naturellement: a sensible doctor). Rose McGowan, physically well cast as Going's …
Micro-budget independent film in high-contrast grainy black-and-white. It might inspire a certain yearning for the bygone days when black-and-white was no more perverse an option than 7-Up in preference to Coke. Even in those days, however, this particular image would have been deemed acceptable only for the duration of a …
Micro-budget independent film in high-contrast grainy black-and-white. It might inspire a certain yearning for the bygone days when black-and-white was no more perverse an option than 7-Up in preference to Coke. Even in those days, however, this particular image would have been deemed acceptable only for the duration of a …
Something to do with a jeweler's widow and some hot rocks. Uncinematic in conception. Unclear in execution. Trés gray and dull, dark and dreary. But the French actress Nicole Garcia (Mon Oncle d'Amerique, etc.), in her new role as a director and co-author, gives a meaty role to her lead …
Screenwriting and directing debut of rapper and actor Ice Cube (a bit-player here), revolving around a seedy strip joint, but sluggishly, chuggingly, lacking the energy to make up for the crudity. With LisaRaye, Bernie Mac, Monica Calhoun, Jamie Foxx.
A tangle of separate lives in Los Angeles, tied up at the end in a tight little knot. Vaguely Alan Rudolph-esque in its refrigerated romanticism, but slicker, perkier, prime-timelier. The large and largely appealing cast (chief exceptions: Ryan Phillippe and Angelina Jolie, deservingly paired off together) has little to work …
Twilight Zone-ish moralistic fantasy about two modern teens who are transported into the black-and-white world of a Fifties sitcom, and who succeed bit by bit, against stout resistance, in colorizing it. Let's overlook the current cultural parochialism that equates black-and-white with the dull, the drab, the stunted, the repressed, the …
Yeasty and somewhat patronizing romp to do with the exotic mating rituals of the Polish-American community in Detroit: first comes baby, then comes marriage. ("All ya gotta do is blow in their ear -- that's what they say about you Polack girls.") Not much of the community at large, in …
Slogging exposition, pushed along by intermittent pop songs, to establish the Curse of the Owens Women ("on any man who would dare love ..."), its origins in the 17th Century, its perpetuation in the present. Half an hour into the movie, a situation develops, a tedious one, with Sandra Bullock …