Woody Allen throws his two cents into the alternative-reality forum. Two playwrights, one tragic and the other comic, are sitting in a New York bistro arguing their respective Weltanschauungs, when a tablemate proposes to tell a true story, and let the playwrights decide whether it's a tragedy or a comedy. …
Nipponese bodice-ripper, from the best-seller by Arthur Golden, though it plays as if it could just as well have been by Danielle Steel, a Cinderella story of the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of a blue-eyed geisha in pre-war and postwar Japan. "A story like mine," …
The lighter side of Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, et al.), lighter even than A Life Less Ordinary, embracing not mere angels, but full-fledged saints. Two little Liverpudlian brothers happen to have a duffel of cash fall in their laps off a passing train. The younger boy, the "clever" …
Inexpensive fantasy, but excessive nonetheless, about a Brit teenager, the daughter of circus people, who works out her relationship with her Mum in a dense, dark, vague dreamscape, self-consciously littered with visual allusions to Bosch, Ernst, Dali, Miro, et al. Stephanie Leonidas, Gina McKee, Jason Barry; written by Neil Gaiman; …
After an absence of fifteen years, Jane Fonda returns to an altered Hollywood landscape (no Julia, no Comes a Horseman, no They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, anywhere in sight) for a frivolous star vehicle, teamed with, or rather pitted against, Jennifer Lopez in what amounts to an extended catfight: an …
Absurdist existential thriller adapted from his own novel by French filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère. A movie made out of nothing: a man (Vincent Lindon, an everyman) shaves off his soup-strainer on a sudden whim, and stands by in deepening shades of disbelief, disappointment, dejection, annoyance, anger, and perhaps madness as no …
A stargazer's delight, if, anyway -- and it's a big if -- you can take delight in gazing at Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (lips and more lips), worshipfully photographed by Bojan Bazelli, and pamperingly enshrined in an ambience of pristine showroom opulence. There is space in this firmament for …
Portrait of a Plucky Old Lady, a screen species that tends more often than not to be British, a subspecies that tends these days to be Judi Dench. She -- Dame Judi -- plays here, very playfully indeed, a well-bred widow from WWII-era London, who, with time and money on …
Softened, sweetened, sentimentalized treatment of a fine little novel by the fine English novelist Elizabeth Taylor. American independent director Dan Ireland has left the basic situation untampered with. A proud lonely widow, resettled at a modest residential hotel in London, makes the chance acquaintance of an impecunious young writer, who …
Lifetime-y movie from Argentina, and from director Ricardo de Montreuil, slickly, superficially done. The wife of a type-A businessman looks to her bohemian brother-in-law for the passion missing from her marriage. Bárbara Mori, a classical glamourpuss, groomed in Mexican telenovelas (a/k/a soaps), conducts an even hotter affair with the camera. …
Steven Spielberg's profoundly pessimistic account of the terrorist massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the bloody aftermath of tit-for-tat reprisals. The director, while he plainly wants to pay his respects to all parties, has not rid himself of his grandiosity and his self-indulgence. The overextended running …
Higgledy-piggledy video documentary on the Paralympic sport of wheelchair rugby, a/k/a quadriplegic rugby, a/k/a murderball. We don't learn much about the sport itself (basic rules of play, coaching strategies, etc.), and the game footage doesn't give us much feel for the flow of the action. It's just score, score, score: …
Hen-party atmosphere for a romantic comedy wherein the sisters of an Irish-Catholic divorcée push her into Internet dating to find a replacement. Diane Lane seems too good for the shticky John Cusack ("You seem very practiced and smooth," she observes), who frankly doesn't act like a man whose favorite movie …
Pedophilia (at the hands of a Little League coach who looks like Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid), male prostitution, unprotected sex and the inevitable V.D., in the "dumb-ass hick town" of Hutchinson, Kansas. Pretty rough in content, and pretty crude in style. The employment of phantom space aliens as …
Director Pawel Pawlikowski, in faded color and with unstable camera, details the youthful indiscretions of two English girls of vastly different backgrounds, a horse-riding, cello-playing aristocrat on suspension from school ("Apparently I'm a bad influence on people") and a freckle-faced commoner who, together with her born-again ex-con brother, runs a …