After his Fight Club, The Game, and Seven, David Fincher's next step is apt to seem a rather modest and old-fashioned thriller: a straightforward damsel-in-distress thing, two damsels to be exact, a well-compensated divorcée with mild claustrophobia and her diabetic daughter, holed up together in an impregnable secret chamber -- …
Subhead: "Three Portraits." In specific, portraits of Delia, Greta, and Paula, each in turn instead of intertwined. The omniscient narrator, male, keeps us constantly mindful of the literary roots of the material ("She felt the ambition drain out of her, like pus from a lanced boil"), a selection of short …
The true survival tale of Wladyslaw Szpilman is the most basic, most elemental, most elementary Holocaust film since Schindler's List, right down to a recitation of the "If you prick us" speech from The Merchant of Venice. Episodic, anecdotal, rich in detail as well as in brutality, absurdity, degradation, and …
Coarse-grained little cheapie with big dreams of crowd-pleasing. Mars Callahan (a good name) plays a too-cool-for-school pool hustler known as the Side-Pocket Kid: a sort of poor man's Ben Affleck, whose restricted range of expression might be taken as smug and obnoxious. (Inasmuch as he also co-wrote and directed, the …
Jamesian literary mystery in the vein of The Aspern Papers and The Figure in the Carpet. Two present-day scholars, an American male who specializes in a fictitious Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria and an English female who specializes in a lesser-known poetess known to be a lesbian, track down evidence …
Japanese live-action comic about a band of futuristic samurai called the Takemikazuchi, and the emergence of their rightful ruler, Princess Yuki, at the ripe age of twenty. Flashes of style, even of emotion, but nothing sustained and persuasive. With Yumiko Shaku and Hideaki Ito; directed by Shinsuke Sato.
Post-Fassbinder mock soap opera (or closer to home, post-Waters) about a popular Alpha Omega Pi girl who, for her obligatory charity work in the Sorority-of-the-Year sweepstakes, mentors a "challenged athlete," falls in love with the beauty of his soul, and becomes a pariah in her charmed social circle. Well: a …
A comedy of knee-jerk quirkiness, from Paul Thomas Anderson, about a major-league misfit impersonated by Adam Sandler. (E.g., he stockpiles Healthy Choice puddings for the promotional offer of frequent-flyer miles, although he never flies, nor does he eat pudding.) One hardly knows which is more of a shock: that the …
Michael Rymer's turgid and narration-heavy adaptation of Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles picks up the story of Lestat (sans Tom Cruise) after the bored bloodsucker awakens from a hundred-year hibernation to an exciting new sound in the world: rock-and-roll. The notion of a vampiric pop star -- all lipstick and …
A tale of political intrigue complicated by romantic intrigue in Indochina in the early 1950s: an idealistic and myopic American secret agent played by Brendan Fraser, and an aloof, effete British journalist played by Michael Caine ("Sooner or later," he is admonished by a native, "one has to take sides …
Factual folk tale of three little half-caste girls who in the early 1930s, by authority of the Aborigines Act, were taken from their home and transported 1200 miles away to an "assimilation" camp, whence they promptly escaped and set out homeward on foot, using the titular structure — "the longest …
Family holiday on the New Zealand coast in the early Seventies. Mom drinks, and has the hots for a fancy-free bachelor with a boat. Dad drinks, too, but stays cool, almost comatose. (Nice still-lifes of the arrangement alongside the lawn chair: bottle of booze, bowl of lemon wedges, plate of …
A look at the divided city of Jerusalem through Muslim eyes, more specifically the eyes of a liberated Palestinian woman. Like Buster Keaton in Seven Chances, though for very different reasons, our protagonist has a nuptial deadline, Tuesday at four o'clock, and a list of approved candidates drawn up by …
Elementary ethnic feminism, to do with the tough choice facing a chubby Chicana: whether to work in an L.A. sweatshop or to attend Columbia University on a full scholarship. (An hour and a half to decide.) Corroboration of the title comes when four overweight seamstresses strip off to compare cellulite. …