An imposter substitute teacher, and local laughingstock rocker, instructs a class of grade-schoolers in What He Knows: rock-and-roll, history and practice. The participation of director Richard Linklater (Slacker, etc.) and screenwriter Mike White (The Good Girl, etc. ) might raise expectations slightly, and similarly raise the results: head of the …
Writer-director Gary Ross runs through the storied career of the too-small racehorse with the too-big jockey, blind in one eye to boot. In this treatment -- a simple horse story amplified into a social history -- the nag must lug the additional weight of the aggregate Little Guy and the …
Frayed coming-of-age yarn tied to a crusty-old-coot comedy. Robert Duvall and Michael Caine are mismatched as brothers, and even worse matched with their stand-ins in flashbacks. Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick; directed by Tim McCanlies.
Alan Rudolph's middle-class midlife-crisis comedy covers similar ground to a Fifties "women's picture": a devoted husband and father begins to suspect his wife of ten years, partner in his dental practice, and extracurricular opera buff, of carrying on an affair with a faceless somebody in a local production of Nabucco. …
The re-enacted downfall of up-and-coming journalist Stephen Glass, twenty-seven of whose forty-one pieces for The New Republic in the mid-Nineties turned out to have been fabricated in whole or in part. No great shakes as a movie, clumping along in the talking-heads style of a TV docudrama, the writing and …
Animated Arabian Nights tale: the ancient mariner given a contempo makeover ("You catch that last move? Pretty cool, huh?") and matched with an equal-opportunity kick-ass chick. What trace of the old Sinbad remains? His supposed noble sacrifice at the end, returning to Syracuse to face the music for the theft …
Three women -- Otar's mother, sister, and niece -- cope with life in post-Soviet Georgia after the man of the family seeks a better life in Paris. The biggest problem they must cope with is Otar's accidental death, a piece of news which the sister and niece conspire to conceal …
Condensed and Americanized version of Dennis Potter's seven-hour miniseries for British television: an author of "detective novels about a gumshoe who warbles," hospitalized and immobilized with a head-to-toe case of psoriasis, escapes into memory and imagination. The whole thing, not just the sessions with the resident head-shrinker (a disguised Mel …
Wrinkly romance between Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, both of whom fudge a bit on their ages (she, when she estimates herself to be "almost" twenty years older than an explicit thirty-six-year-old; and he, when he holds up three fingers to indicate how far he is past sixty), but both …
No, it's not Hitchcock, but it's suspenseful anyhow. Filmmaker Jeffrey Blitz follows eight of the 249 finalists in the National Spelling Bee, from widely varied backgrounds, through the two-day competition in Washington, D.C., and the weeks of preparation leading up to it. Only a serviceable documentary technique, and a subpar …
Time goes by for a Buddhist monk and his lone pupil on a floating sanctuary in a Korean lake. Slow, schematic, didactic, visually detailed, dramatically stunted. Kim Ki-Duk writes, directs, and stars.
The kind of big-theme fiction film that might expect to receive some brownie points in advance. Certainly Norman Jewison is that kind of filmmaker: In the Heat of the Night, F.I.S.T., And Justice for All, A Soldier's Story, Agnes of God, etc., etc. But the original novel by Brian Moore, …
The rare feature film to be built around a dwarf -- a taciturn loner who moves into an abandoned train depot in a remote corner of New Jersey to get away from other people ("Hey, buddy, where's Snow White?"), and who instead falls into a web of new relationships with …
Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown (The Endless Summer and The Endless Summer II), has grabbed a camera and followed his father's footprints into the surf, assembling a workmanlike testimonial to the religion of riding the waves. Inspirational illustration is evenly balanced with interview and voice-over pearls of wisdom: "The …
A touchstone in the field of documentary filmmaking, setting an untoppable standard for personal involvement on the part of a filmmaker. In 1982, while a student at Southern Illinois, the future director of Hoop Dreams, Steve James, signed up to be the Big Brother of a troubled eleven-year-old in rural …