Florid, gaudy, tricksy, anything-for-attention neo-noir about a speed freak and stool pigeon who in his former life was a blissfully married blues trumpeter. "Keep your eyes open," he advises us straightaway in voice-over. "Nothing is as it seems." Just as good a reason to keep them shut. Val Kilmer, Vincent …
There's a lot going on, probably too much: the son of Father Christmas has landed himself on the Naughty List and requires some emergency parental attention; a contractual codicil dictates that the incumbent Santa must leave office if he fails to find a Mrs. Claus by Christmas Eve; in Santa's …
Kiddie "camp" about a quartet of junior detectives (collectively, Mystery Inc.) and a computer-animated talking dog, who, along with assorted monsters, seems to inhabit a separate plane of existence. A lot of it is apt to go over the little ones' heads, and for that matter the big ones', too. …
A cheesy prequel -- of Limburger smelliness -- to The Mummy and more particularly The Mummy Returns. Or: How the Last of the Akkadians Got Scorpion Blood in His Veins and Became a King. It goes to show, if nothing else, that if you take the mummy out of the …
Magnificent setting -- a fishing village on the coast of Iceland -- for a wormy, writhing, posturingly twisted view of humanity. The foretastes of things to come, during the opening credits, are tantalizing, though hardly sufficient to sustain you till the end. Gunnar Eyjolfsson, Hilmir Snaer Guonason, Hélène de Fougerolles …
Naughty romantic comedy (punish it if you please) about a self-mutilator since seventh grade, fresh out of the mental institution, who finds employment and a perfect match with a lone-wolf lawyer and closet spanker. It gives away its destination, or at least part of its itinerary, right at the outset, …
French sex odyssey, as only the French know how. The journey begins with the bonding of a pair of girl-power sexual guerrillas ("Let's use our guts and our asses to climb the social ladder"), loses its way in the labyrinth of office politics, and smashes on the rocks, so to …
An anthology of short films, mostly fictional, by eleven directors from eleven countries: a world-wide range of perspectives on the fall of the Twin Towers. Nice idea (producer Alain Brigand's), but inconsistent inspiration, uneven relevance (Ken Loach wants to address the assassination of Allende, Shohei Imamura wants to return to …
Duelling process servers. A millionaire cattleman and his trophy wife each want to be first to serve divorce papers, in order to secure a favorable court venue: progressive New York vs. backwards Texas. Labored, and often quite low, comedy. (Lowest point: the massage of a bull's prostate by an imposter …
Salacious video documentary on three swinging couples -- well, two couples and one ménage à trois. It enables you to tag along and sample the "lifestyle" without any active involvement, though it's too unappetizing to serve as a recruiting film. The filmmakers, Joe and Harry Gantz, gain extraordinary intimacy with …
Rabid underdoggism on a tight leash. Plucky little second-division Kilnockie makes a run at the Scottish Cup through a gauntlet of Goliaths. (Real-life soccer star Ally McCoist, in his confident acting debut, leads the way.) Bright clean color from veteran cameraman Alex Thomson; irrepressibly prancing Celtic background music from Mark …
Genial spoof, too innocuous and lazy-minded to be construed as satire, of "reality television." A no-nonsense LAPD detective, in the departmental doghouse after putting a bullet in a TV news camera ("He's Dirty Harry, he's real ... and we've got him by the balls"), is compelled to co-operate on a …
Science-fictional Hollywood satire that just barely qualifies as science fiction: an embattled filmmaker (Al Pacino, having fun for a change) fires his female lead and substitutes a computer-generated cyberstar known as Simone, short for Simulation One. In a nutshell: "Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect …
A brother and his keeper: a drunken Indian ("sad cliché") and a tribal lawman who literally "goes off the res" as an avenging vigilante. The educational prologue on the Lakotas of Pine Ridge (seventy-five-percent unemployment, etc.) shows us that director Chris Eyre has his heart in the right place -- …