The second feature from Lynne Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher attracted some puzzlingly rapturous reviews. For that matter, so has this one, the title of which -- the name of the Scottish heroine, not some untranslated snatch of Norwegian -- is off-putting for different reasons. The film might, or might not, sound …
Sort of an elaborated segment of "The Unexplained" on TV's Unsolved Mysteries, minus Robert Stack and his trenchcoat. Purportedly based on a factual case circa 1967 (here updated), it details some strange doings in anticipation of a major calamity in the small town of Point Pleasant, W. Va. No more …
Steven Brill's update of the Depression-period Capra-Cooper antique, populism and preachiness intact, is an above-average Adam Sandler comedy, about a sweet-natured rube who inherits a bundle. (Forty billion, for inflation.) The average is raised in large part by the rest of the batting order, Peter Gallagher, Erick Avari (the one …
Barbet Schroeder, coming off his engagé political thriller Our Lady of the Assassins, reverts to his Hollywood-hack mode, with an updated Loeb-Leopold case about a precocious, Nietzschean, absinthe-sipping high-school misfit who masterminds a "perfect crime" in collaboration with a cocky BMOC. For hack work, however, it is a handsome job, …
Self-anointed "Frump Girl" meets Mr. Wonderful, with the X-ray vision to see the beauty within. Only problem: he's not Greek. Nia Vardalos, scriptwriter and star, gets to unburden herself on her lineage ("My cousins have two volumes, loud and louder"), and at the same time indulge herself in an Ugly …
Paolo Virzì’s film follows "an Italian liberal arts student who falls in love with a young American tourist met in Sicily and decides to track her down in the United States." In Italian with English subtitles.
A fresh setting -- the Hindu community in Trinidad in the mid-20th Century -- but rather a limp, damp comedy about the local "pundit," a part-time faith healer and part-time author. It gathers a little steam as his fame grows, but only a little, and a long way in. Based …
High-gloss, well-funded experimentalism from Godfrey Reggio, a compendium of camera and computer tricks, and a companion to his Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi -- right down to the musical wallpaper by Philip Glass. We find out at the end, in the only verbal text of the movie, that the title is Hopi …
Down-and-dirty cop thriller, as hard to follow as it is to stomach. The pell-mell direction of tyro Joe Carnahan is geared to grab attention, and it definitely caught the eye of Tom Cruise, who threw his weight behind it as an after-the-fact executive producer. With Jason Patric, Ray Liotta, Busta …
Second-chance romance for two fifty-four-year-old New Yorkers, a social worker played by Jill Clayburgh (Ms. Zeitgeist of 1979) and a pest controller played by Jeffrey Tambor (an actor who has spent too much time in television comedy, breeding ground of oily insincerity). They find each other at the vulnerable moment …
Worth seeing if for nothing more than the opening credits, unspooled in front of a Victorian toy theater of the type that Stevenson memorialized in his essay, "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured." Each of the principal players is represented by a look-alike paper cutout, and the behind-the-scenes collaborators are …
First feature film from Bob Rafelson since his savory Blood and Wine, seven years previous, a heist-and-hostage thing to do with a diabetic grand-theft-auto detective (Samuel L. Jackson, wearing a hairpiece almost as plush as the one in Pulp Fiction) who, as a favor to a neighbor, goes looking for …
Family of German Jews -- father, mother, and a daughter portrayed by two dissimilar actresses within the span of the Second World War -- emigrates to Kenya to escape the Nazis. (Grandfather stays behind with the mandatory line: "This will all be over in one or two years.") Their experiences …
Psychological suspenser, sort of a stripped-down Ruth Rendell thriller, about "Sy the photo guy" at SavMart, and his abnormal obsession with an outwardly perfect family whose lives he knows through their faithful patronage. It seems to be moving toward a conventional explosion of violence, and it is indeed conventional despite …
Confused-teen-crazy-world comedy, fairly formulaic (a gallery of stereotypes, a splash of gross-out, a dab of sentiment, an instructive moral), notwithstanding the genuflections to Fine Literature. Agile comic turns by Jack Black, Catherine O'Hara, Lily Tomlin, and John Lithgow. But the romantic leads, Colin Hanks and Schuyler Fisk, bear so strong …