Facile, unassuming, amusing comedy to do with a Chinese-American mother and daughter who bear separate social burdens: the widowed mother is pregnant again at age forty-eight, and the unmarried daughter has a new lesbian lover. The playing is uneven: Joan Chen is a cagy old pro, while the younger generation …
Violent kidnap thriller from Venezuela, virtually unwatchable, even unseeable, through the fuzzed-up video image and jazzed-up cinematic technique. With Mía Maestro, Jean Paul Leroux, and Rubén Blades; written and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz.
A tangled-web tale, succinct, adult, a trifle stodgy. The setting-up of an illusion of happiness and a veneer of civilization (the country life, cricket, Constable landscapes) is rather pedantic, but the weaving of the web itself is easily followed and understood. With Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Rupert Everett, Hermione Norris; …
The short-lived sci-fi TV series, Firefly, finds new life on the big screen, and latecomers are apt to feel at a decided disadvantage. The garbled storytelling and affected, facetious, rapid-fire style of dialogue, alternately highflown and down-home, will win few new converts, and will doubtless help to explain the short …
The classic romantic triangle, older man, younger woman, young man. The older man is the immaculately groomed, impeccably tailored Steve "Suave" Martin (author of the original novella as well as its adapter to the screen), who glides up to the glove counter at Saks, follows the salesgirl's advice on a …
Comic-book burlesque of the hard-boiled film noir, tougher than tough, cooler than cool, bloodier than bloody, sillier than silly. Robert Rodriguez adapted it -- or more accurately, copied it -- from Frank Miller's series of graphic novels; and he insisted, to the point of resigning from the Director's Guild, on …
The grin-and-bear-it title, from a best-selling "tween" novel by Ann Brashares, refers to a clique of four sixteen-year-old girlfriends in Bethesda, Md., linked from the womb in their mothers' prenatal aerobics class, who purchase a pair of thrift-shop jeans that magically fit their dissimilar bodies ("scientifically impossible"), and who mail …
Dilapidated mansion in the bayou. Walls without mirrors. A secret room in the attic. Strange hoodoo rites. Long-ago deaths by violence. It's all there but the magic. Southern Gothic hysterics with no involvement. Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard; directed by Iain Softley.
Sydney Pollack's rookie documentary, a casual portrait of his personal friend, né Frank Goldberg, "the leading architect in the world today" (in the words of fellow architect Philip Johnson). The visual quality of the image is highly uneven, and happily the pictures of his actual work are sharper and clearer …
Kurt Russell goes back to his beginnings: silly Disney family films, this one a sort of live-action version of The Incredibles, with Russell and Kelly Preston as the superhero parents (realtors by day) of a "late bloomer" who in his freshman year at the elite prep school must be assigned …
Talky, stagy, draggy dramatization of the martyrdom in 1943 of a student resistance leader under the Third Reich. Vibrantly acted, even so, by Julia Jentsch as the music-loving revolutionary and by Alexander Held as her relentless interrogator. The material is intrinsically grim, but that's no excuse for the dismal cinematography. …
Time-travel brainteaser of passable intellectual complexity, based on a Ray Bradbury short story (respectable s-f pedigree), and directed by Peter Hyams (Timecop, 2010, Outland, among others in the genre). The year is 2055, and a moneymaking enterprise called Time Safari arranges hunting expeditions into prehistory to gun down the same …
Complex relationship film. Parents and children, husband and wife, brother and brother, in the main, but supplementarily wife and lover, male professor and female student, older boy and new girlfriend, among others. The uncommon specificity as to time and place and cultural milieu -- 1986, Brooklyn, the bourgeois intelligentsia -- …
George Lucas closes the circle: the last of the three prequels, evenly spaced out at three-year intervals. (The filmmaker's latter-day visual style comes back to us in a twinkling: the flatness of the humans and the overfertilized fluorescence of their computer-generated surroundings, something like sticks of wood in a stop-motion …
A tortured art student with writhing eyebrows plans to kill himself in three days on his twenty-first birthday, and a psychotherapist in pants as short as early-Beatles hastens to prevent it. A pattern of duplications and repetitions establishes an air of oddness, and the narrative line spirals off increasingly into …