Kick-ass Kafka, from South Korea, and from filmmaker Chan-wook Park, about an ordinary citizen imprisoned without charge in a shabby apartment, framed during his stay for his wife's murder, set free after fifteen years, and allotted a matter of days to answer the questions of who imprisoned him and why. …
A post-collegiate fraternity, complete with hazing, beer-chugging, streaking, KY wrestling, etc. In short, a "guy" comedy. Or anyway a young-guy comedy. Or anyway a dumb-young-guy comedy. And for the girls: a fellatio class taught by a male homosexual with carrots and cucumbers for props. Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, …
It is one of the mysteries of cinema: the production can be slick as a hockey rink, the camera movements agile and athletic, the angles exalting, the action unrelenting, the overall direction giddy with the joy of creation, and still the movie can be stupefyingly dull. This second sequel to …
Exploitation cheapie on the world of cybersex. The video image of "real life" is nearly as low-grade as the computer-screen images. And the continual split-screens are as cluttered as a Website homepage. With Josh Hamilton, Harold Perrineau, Vanessa Ferlito, and Isabel Gillies; directed by Jed Weintrob.
Kevin Costner, star and director both, renews his commitment to the Western. And one of the foremost things to be said about it, or for it, is that it's a better and a braver movie in the year 2003 than it would have been in, say, 1953. What would have …
A supernatural stinker (call it The Odor, if you prefer) about the earthshaking showdown between the last of the Carolingian priests and the last of the Sin Eaters. The latter -- an immortal who in effect vacuums out the grime from human souls, granting deathbed redemption to the unrepentant -- …
No, not that Osama, but rather a pseudonymous twelve-year-old Afghan girl disguised as a boy in order to find employment (shades of Baran). Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak, the first post-Taliban film from Afghanistan -- not that we were inundated with pre-Taliban ones -- is predictably about the miseries …
Familiar situation (in movies, not in life) of the framed lawman steering a murder investigation away from himself, staying one step ahead of his estranged wife, the newly appointed homicide detective. For a while the movie feigns an interest in human relationships -- a romantic triangle or quadrangle, depending on …
This scrimping, barren, almost desolate independent film generates above-average interest and disappointment as the sophomore feature film of Richard Kwietniowski, following Love and Death on Long Island. John Hurt, so good as the ivory-tower homosexual in that film, tends rather to expose too much as a cutthroat Atlantic City casino …
A true tale of disco decadence -- drugs, debauchery, Ringling Brothers costumes, and ultimately murder, to say nothing of the low-grade video on which it's recorded -- concerning "the king of club kids" and his mentor. (Says the kid: "You're the Yoda to my Luke." The mentor offers a different …
Itinerant gambler out of England, now in New England, woos a Portuguese fisherman's widow and seafood-house fado singer. Bland and predictable, though the leading lady (Sofia Milos) is regally beautiful, and her teenage daughter (Emmy Rossum) cute as a button. With Jason Isaacs, Seymour Cassel, Theresa Russell, Lupe Ontiveros; directed …
Not exactly a time-travel thriller, more correctly a "time-viewing" thriller (i.e., a science-fictional crystal ball), but it has all the same illogicalities. And not exactly an amnesia thriller, either, but rather a "memory-erasure" thriller. Sleek and fast and forgettable. And slightly less stupid than most John Woo films, notwithstanding the …
Well, it's better than Hook, anyhow. And it meets the need, if any, for a live-action version of J.M. Barrie's children's classic in state-of-the-art 21st-century technology. Or as the ad line puts it: "The timeless story as you've never seen it before," meaning, for example, that by means of Forrest …
The fundamental idea -- a thriller tethered for almost its total running time to a public telephone, squarely in the telescopic sights of a taunting sniper -- had reportedly been around long enough for scriptwriter Larry Cohen (subsequently the writer-director of such disreputable entertainments as It's Alive and The Private …
Thanksgiving-from-Hell comedy wherein a rebellious daughter, living in a bad neighborhood in the big city, tries to prepare her first holiday meal for her barely functional family from the suburbs. Small but broad, cheap but commercial, with a movie-stealing performance by Sean Hayes as the prissy upstairs neighbor in possession …