World Cup drama set in post-war Switzerland.
Women's Western, concerned with a frontier healer (Cate Blanchett) and her relationship issues, her maternal instincts, her sexual urges. One day her estranged and very strange father (Tommy Lee Jones, as "Mr. Jones") turns up on her New Mexico homestead, having long ago gone native and converted himself into a …
In 1885 New Mexico, a frontier medicine woman forms an uneasy alliance with her estranged father when her daughter is kidnapped by an Apache brujo. Directed by Ron Howard, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Aaron Eckhart, Val Kilmer, and Evan Rachel Wood.
Julia Roberts, her two-ton ego, and her tapering tusklike head, in the part of a "forward-thinker" who travels east from Oakland State to her dream job at Wellesley, there to impart Art History platitudes and feminist fundamentals to the future homemakers in the Class of '54, and to lock horns …
French coming-of-age trifle, set in the Sixties, with a rock-and-roll playlist to prove it, about a Muslim grocer ("I'm not an Arab. I'm from the Golden Crescent") who helps a neighborhood Jewish boy to pinch pennies and save up for streetwalkers. Plenty of sightseeing interest, both in Paris and on …
Dramatized legal brief on behalf of the bisexual streetwalker and serial killer and (outside the scope of the movie) death-penalty cause célèbre, Aileen Wuornos, who just wanted, like anyone else, to love and be loved and of course, as per the first-person voice-over at the outset, "be in the movies." …
Will Ferrell as a human raised by elves, leaving the womb of Santa's Workshop in full adulthood to track down his biological father, a bottom-line publisher of Kiddie Lit ("He's on the naughty list"). Directed by Jon Favreau, the film wants to play both sides of the street — to …
About as "personal" as a documentary can get. Nathaniel Kahn, the unacknowledged bastard son of Philadelphia-based architect Louis Kahn (whose obituary in the New York Times mentioned only one offspring, a daughter, Sue Ann), sets out twenty-five years after his father's death, when the filmmaker had been but a boy …
Blue-collar weepie about a twenty-three-year-old mother with two months to live and an ambitious to-do list: make someone fall in love with her, find a new mate for her husband, record birthday messages to both of her daughters up until they're eighteen, and so on. The tousled verisimilitude is at …
Maximilian Schell's documentary portrait of, and tribute to, his older sibling, Maria Schell, her acting career long in eclipse, and her health and financial status in dire straits. The coy camerawork in the first half-hour of the film -- no more than pieces of the titular figure from the neck …
Clint Eastwood's somber meditation on chance, fate, doom; scarred souls and endless repercussions; violence begetting violence. Just as Unforgiven was an act of penance for body counts in his Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns as well as in his self-directed imitation Leones (High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider), …
Bickersome mixed-race buddy action-comedy, whose action is little distinguishable from the action in many noncomedies. Steve Zahn, with bristly hair and mustache of equal length, and the general demeanor of a man trying to bench-press 300 lbs., manages to stay in character, or near it, while Martin Lawrence stays nearer …
Gentle satire of Hollywood, nestled in peach-toned photography, about a frustrated scriptwriter, currently a flunky for a high-rolling production company, who gets some buzz going on a nonexistent screenplay by a nonexistent writer and sets off a bidding war. The young independent filmmakers -- transplanted French director François Velle and …
Mexican approximation of a Guy Ritchie caper film, or in other words Quentin Tarantino twice removed: brisk, brutal, callous, convoluted, technologically tricksy. If, under director Hugo Rodriguez, it's a bit more ragged, it's a bit more human into the bargain. That element appears to carry over into a repeated pattern …
The final installment in the Polish brothers' place-name trilogy (Twin Falls Idaho and Jackpot, earlier) is without doubt something different, but that doesn't mean it isn't something awful, a lugubrious curio about the evacuation of a desert town in the shadow of a proposed dam in the mid-Fifties, while at …