Needless rehash of a Norman Jewison caper film that was hash already in 1968. Faye Dunaway, the female lead of the original, is thrown a small bone: the nonfunctional role of the hero's therapist. Rene Russo, meanwhile, inherits the demeaning lead role — the intrepid insurance investigator who succumbs to …
A kind of update of Kelly's Heroes, in deportment as well as in period: an insanity-of-war movie, set impudently at the end of Desert Storm, centered around four American soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and, immediately recognizable as expendable, Spike Jonze) who have extracted from a captive Iraqi's …
A kind of update of Kelly's Heroes, in deportment as well as in period: an insanity-of-war movie, set impudently at the end of Desert Storm, centered around four American soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and, immediately recognizable as expendable, Spike Jonze) who have extracted from a captive Iraqi's …
An American foreign film, subtitles and all, shot in Vietnam by first-time director Tony Bui, a Saigon native raised in Sunnyvale, California. The ambitious survey of postwar society -- a cyclo driver and the call girl he has a crush on, a flower girl and the leprous poet she coaxes …
The hard life of Kurdish tire smugglers on the mountainous border of Iran and Iraq: in specific, the hard life of a parentless family of five siblings who need some fast cash to afford a life-prolonging operation for an incurable crippled brother. Some striking imagery (e.g., those tractor-sized tires steepled …
Not a direct adaptation of the final volume of Proust's masterwork, but a free fantasia on all things Proustian. Overdressed, overdecorated, overstuffed (albeit underlit) period production, riddled with alien surrealistic bizarreries. Marcello Mazzarella, Emmanuelle Béart, Catherine Deneuve, Vincent Perez, and (in practiced though imperfect French) John Malkovich; directed by Raul …
Stage director/designer Julie Taymor's high-culture cocktail of homicide, filicide, regicide, rape, mutilation, amputation, decapitation, and cannibalism will not change the minds of those who would argue that Titus Andronicus is incorrectly attributed to William Shakespeare. It can only make their argument easier: the Bard on a motorcycle, in a video …
At nearly two and three-quarters hours, it is overlong. And with its crowded and closed-in images, jammed up with people and furniture and bric-a-brac and dark walls, it is overheavy. At the same time, this is a very substantial film, probing the anguish and dissatisfaction behind the great (and cheerful) …
A sure bet to be enjoyed by all who enjoyed the first one. And endured by most others. The central theme of the built-in obsolescence of children's toys -- Woody, the pull-string cowboy, has suffered a torn shoulder and is retired to the shelf while his owner goes off to …
Sweet, sentimental, idealized run-through of the getting-to-know-one-another dance of a dimpled Dobie Gillis/Wally Cleaver type (Christian Campbell, Neve's brother), who writes unproduced Broadway musicals, and the T-shirted tawny stud (John Paul Pitoc) who catches his eye when he enters the same subway car in momentous slow-motion. The movie no doubt …
Clint Eastwood is under his own direction in the role of a recently on-the-wagon and unrepentently womanizing newspaperman, busily trying to prove a condemned man's innocence on the day of execution. The detective work is pretty sketchy, pretty shaky. But the plotting of the movie takes a backseat to its …
Small movie with a large central performance from Janet McTeer, a British actress putting on a thick white-trashy Southern accent, as a lusty, gusty single mom, four times married, who drags her twelve-year-old daughter (Kimberly J. Brown) from West Virginia to Southern California for their latest fresh start. Angela Shelton's …
Time-travel fantasy, with the bare minimum of snags and snarls in logic. A struggling London actor (Douglas Henshall), self-described as a "Marlon fucking Brando," sincerely regrets the infidelity and confession thereof -- the confession perhaps a bit more than the infidelity -- that came between him and his girlfriend of …
A weirdie, co-written by Michael and Mark Polish, directed by only Michael, about the warming relationship of a heart-of-gold hooker and one half of a set of Siamese twins (the merely identical Polishes, who look and act a bit like Adam Sandler on Valium). The twins' synchronized movements and conspiratorial …
Classmates at Tehran U., one from a small town, the other from the big city. The brighter student, the small towner, is forced into strangling wedlock, while the other is free to follow her dreams (and drop out of the movie). Rudimentary feminism, mundane, flat, monotonous in presentation. Directed by …