Screen debut of rapper Eminem, a pop-star acting vehicle not unlike some of the more serious (everything being relative) of the early Elvis vehicles: Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Wild in the Country. (The Eminem character is even addressed on occasion as "Elvis.") On the score of "realism," one …
It starts out in the precinct of Joseph Wambaugh's Police Story — L.A. cop shoots and kills petty drug dealer, goes on an extended bender, loses his family, emerges months later at A.A. meetings — but it soon veers off toward more routine TV cop shows. Director Hal Ashby has …
A family-man gumshoe follows the trail of an apparent snuff film (a genre originally dismissed as an "urban myth") into the S&M; underworld, with a Hollywood porn-shop clerk as his guide. Hyperbolic detective story, combining the routine barbarity and depravity of a Matthew Scudder case (Lawrence Block, novelist) with a …
Bio of bull rider and youngest-ever inductee into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, Lane Frost. It's sincere; it's direct; it's, more than anything else, narrowly focussed: parents, a couple of buddies, a wife, that's it. The epilogue of documentary footage, home movies, and family-album photos persuades us that the …
François Ozon offers up, for specialized tastes, a cinephiliac musical-comedy whodunit, set at a snowbound country house in the late Fifties or early Sixties, with an all-female cast (exclusive of the faceless male corpse). The deliberate staginess and theatricality -- it was adapted from a forgotten play by Robert Thomas …
Post-apocalyptic computer cartoon by Shane Acker, set in a rusty, dusty, color-deprived future. “But life,” intones the rumbling narrator at the outset, “must go on,” even if only in the form of Lilliputian cloth-doll automatons hounded by Brobdingnagian mechanized cutlery. The realistic graphic style displays an endless devotion to tactility …
Hope lives! Hayden Christensen (Jumper) and Kate Bosworth (Homefront) star in a story about the power of prayer. A man gets into a car wreck and dies. But then he comes back with the news that in the interim, he was in heaven. And then he must recover himself, physically …
A film of famous post-production troubles, so watered down in the editing (or somewhere) that you can no longer tell what the hard stuff originally was. Scotch? Bourbon? Rye? Whatever it was, it tastes now like nothing kickier than oversugared and overiced tea: something to do with two style-conscious voluptuaries …
Michael Shannon gets the thankless task of trying to humanize Wall Street's capitalist swine Gordon Gekko, right down to the speech about how hard work never really helped anybody get ahead and the passing of the moral buck on to the whole rotten, rigged, remorseless system. (Thankless because it's Gekko's …
Half-baked hot dish of sex and rock-and-roll, another penetration (so to speak) of triple-X hardcore into the aboveground art house, a plotless chronicle of the burbling passion of two young strangers who meet at a concert and then go on attending concerts in between demonstrations of their passion: tonguing, fingering, …
Alexandre Aja directs the story of a neurologist seeking to make contact with a comatose nine-year-old boy in order to discover the true nature of the fall that made him that way.
An anxiety-ridden man who embarks on a surreal Kafkaesque odyssey back home after his mother suddenly dies, confronting his greatest fears along the way. From his darkest fears comes the greatest adventure. Directed by Ari Aster and starring Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix.
A film that lives up to its title. Forgive the prudish tone, but for once, I’d have gladly sacrificed the f-bombs and duelling dildos that warranted an R rating so that parents would have felt more comfortable taking the family to a madcap mother-daughter (Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu) bonding …