Heavy-breathing political thriller about a revolutionary Indian girl, nineteen years old, on a suicide mission in an unclear cause: "My mission is for the future of our people." The beauties of nature offer ironic, or irrelevant, counterpoint. With Ayesha Dharkar; written, directed, photographed by Santosh Sivan.
The fraternal filmmaking team of Peter and Bobby Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin) step up their efforts to push bad taste past the threshold of bravery. The sticking point in this undertaking is that there is nothing pushing back. The dam broke a long time ago, and the Farrellys are …
Terrence Malick's adaptation of James Jones's WWII novel also marks his return to the director's chair after a vacation of twenty years: too heavy a weight for any movie, or moviemaker, to carry. One of the problems with Malick's earlier works -- the crutch of voice-over narration -- is here …
The premise, solidly science-fictional, is of a man whose entire life has been a twenty-four-hour-a-day cable TV show and who doesn't know it. His imprisoningly finite universe is an enormous, enclosed biospheric sound stage constructed next to the hillside "Hollywood" sign and dotted with 5,000 hidden cameras. Its residents, aside …
Ill-fated noble experiment of a boxing club for the unlikely lads in a provincial English nowheresville. The harsh black-and-white photography, evocative of the kitchen-sink heyday, is an unexpected attraction, and Bob Hoskins is dependably one. But too little boxing (too little training, for certain), too many pop-song interludes, and too …
A nice, not thrilling run-through of conventions in the private-eye genre, taken at a totteringly slow tempo, and lowered in pitch for the gravelly voices of old-timers. Watching Paul Newman working with the likes of Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, Stockard Channing, and James Garner — wily veterans whetting some already …
An audience endurance test, at a mere ninety minutes in length, set in the spacious split-level loft of an unsuccessful New York actor, and cornered two-timer. (A Jules and Jim poster, token of sexual egalitarianism, decorates his wall.) Stagy, despite the frequently tilted camera; witlessly, rattlingly talky; and Robert Downey, …
Contemporization, and commonization, of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. The two youthy riffraffy Seattle fortune-hunters, Cynthia and Buck, who get high on cough syrup and say things like "Chill out," do their share to lower the proceedings. But it is impossible not to retain some interest as long …
Sort of a sequel to, more of a spinoff from, The Fugitive, with the relentless Sam Gerard on the trail of another innocent escapee from a prison transport. (This one's a framed superspy.) There's a kind of justice in this turn of events, since Tommy Lee Jones upstaged the nominal …
Smart-assy, rock-and-rolly bloodsucking fantasy. Thomas Ian Griffith cuts a fine figure as the world's first-known vampire, a fallen priest of the 14th Century, now in search of the legendary Black Cross that will enable him to walk by day. But James Woods as the gunslinging, Vatican-sanctioned vampire slayer, wearing jeans …
Todd Haynes's self-indulgent and overreaching excavation of the "glam" scene of the early Seventies. It starts out in mid-19th Century with the arrival on earth of Oscar Wilde, deposited on a Dublin doorstep by flying saucer. After a forward leap of a hundred years, it settles down (somewhat) to a …
Very irritating things, besides. Sick comedy, written and directed by actor Peter Berg, about a cacophonous quintet of judgment-impaired bachelor-partiers who decide to hide the body of the Vegas hooker who dies on their hands. (What makes the ringleader so sure that nobody -- no boyfriend, no girlfriend, no roommate, …
Someone's a lottery winner in Tulaigh Mhór, a/k/a Tully More, population fifty-two. The problem is, he died of excitement with his signed ticket in his hand: no reason the winnings, a shade under seven million, shouldn't be split fifty-one ways among his neighbors, if one of them can successfully pass …
Adam Sandler. Poster boy, more like it, for the legions who just can't take movies seriously. In this one -- a formula Disney sports story for the legions who just can't understand why Rudy wasn't in the starting lineup for Notre Dame -- he goes from being the butt of …
Adam Sandler bids to expand his range -- into niceness, romanticness, sweetness, dullness. (Actually, he had reached dullness before, but from another direction.) His bitterness over his broken heart permits him an occasional lapse, too, into more familiar Sandlerisms. There's a well-conceived screen moment when he misinterprets the mood of …