Lili Taylor, much in her element, plays one of Anne Tyler's lonely, loopy protagonists, an amusement-park bunny in North Carolina, living at home with her shortwave-hobbyist father ("There's too much Spanish in the world") and nurturing a fixation on a garage-band rocker called Drumstrings Casey. (On impulse, she carves his …
A connoisseur's thriller from writer-director David Mamet, distilled almost to a state of abstraction. The President's daughter, a wing-spreading college student in Boston, has had the bad fortune to get herself shanghaied as a sex slave, ticketed for the Middle East, on the same day she has had her hair …
Two years later, Sam Raimi adds the inevitable second chapter to an above-average comic-book adaptation, pushing his slugging percentage even a little higher, following up the bloop single of Spider-Man with a ground-ball double just inside the foul line. The approach stays the same: a stress on character and relationship, …
Two years later, Sam Raimi adds the inevitable second chapter to an above-average comic-book adaptation, pushing his slugging percentage even a little higher, following up the bloop single of Spider-Man with a ground-ball double just inside the foul line. The approach stays the same: a stress on character and relationship, …
Big-screen blowup of the Nickelodeon TV cartoon show, brain-child of writer-director Stephen Hillenburg. After a campy musical prologue with some live-action pirates, we are introduced to the ocean-floor community of Bikini Bottom; to the title character who looks as much like a block of Swiss cheese as like an O-Cel-O …
Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation of his own play, directed by Richard Eyre, erects a protofeminist milestone, early Restoration period, to mark the end of one era and the dawn of another: Charles the Second's edict which lifted the ban on women on the English stage, and a second-thought edict (sped along …
Zero points for originality of concept or strategy of execution: another vintage TV show transferred to the big screen, and, after the fashion of The Brady Bunch of similar vintage, held up to ridicule for its datedness (its tight pants, its wide collars, its perms), among other things. The results …
Japanese anime, set in Victorian England, where for a change the Japanese animators are relieved of their onerous duty to draw ethnic-unspecific characters, sometimes practically extraterrestrial characters, with inverted-pyramid heads, doll's eyes, and check-mark mouths. These recognizable human beings, by contrast, are Englishmen (voiced by the likes of Alfred Molina, …
A warm-up of Ira Levin's scare story about the robot spouses who fulfill the domestic ideals of Madison Avenue in the Fifties. Or rather, a cool-down of it. The original screen version, directed by Bryan Forbes in 1975, plowed into the battlefield of Women's Lib when there was still a …
Dromedary tearjerker, part ethnographic documentary, part folklore. The story is this: a Mongolian camel rejects her first-born colt, and a tribe of herders in the Gobi Desert send for a violinist to perform a "Hoos ritual," a musical mediation between estranged mother and babe. Illuminating in a dull sort of …
Hectoring documentary on the relationship between American fast food and American obesity, and insufficiently funny to compensate for the preachment. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, attempting to walk in the shoes of Michael Moore, risks his own body for science, if not for art: eating nothing but McDonald's for thirty days straight. …
Abysmal holiday comedy in which a lonesome ad man (an almost demented Ben Affleck) hires himself a ready-made family for a quarter-million dollars to see him through the Yuletide blues. Unaccountably released to theaters in time for Halloween. With James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Christina Applegate; directed by Mike Mitchell.
Serial-killer thriller about (brace yourself) a serial killer of serial killers. That's not some figure of speech synonymous with the serial killer's serial killer, or the serial killer to beat all serial killers, or the mother of all serial killers, or some such. It means literally that he serially kills …