A war widow (Emmanuelle Béart, pouting with both lips) and her two children join a mass exodus out of Nazi-besieged Paris, leading to a prettily pictured pastoral idyll at an abandoned manor in the countryside, under the protective wing of an illiterate seventeen-year-old stranger with a suspiciously short haircut. The …
The inseparable Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, do a comedy about joined-at-the-hip brothers, Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon ("We're not Siamese"). The principal self-revelation to come out of this is something we already knew about them: their taste, if that word may be used in the vicinity of the Farrellys, …
Puff piece on the elite unit of the LAPD, "the most honored, most respected, most professional police division in the world." Not that there isn't turmoil in the ranks: a trigger-happy loose cannon ("SWAT means Special Weapons and Tactics. Where were your tactics out there?"), a fed-up girlfriend, a paper-pushing …
Slick commercial venture, from François Ozon, with a strong sense of place, weather, character, clothes, as well as a strong sense of humor, several cheesy plot turns, and several square yards of female flesh. It concerns a dried-up British mystery novelist (Charlotte Rampling, whose square yards of flesh are now …
TV-caliber true story of Australian backstroker Tony Fingleton (who authored the script himself) and of the abusive alcoholic father who favored his other two sons, the freestyler and the no-talent bully. (To judge by his rendition of Chopin on the piano in the parlor, before the bully slams the lid …
The inevitable Sylvia Plath biopic. Had it come sooner, the wan, willowy, nasally Gwyneth Paltrow would not have been the inevitable Sylvia Plath. The actress's lack of inner power gives validation to the theory that Plath tended in her poems to exaggerate, to embroider, and to overdramatize on purpose. Of …
Big, ambitious, commercial combat film from South Korea: two brothers thrown in the path of the Communist invasion of 1950. An Asian Saving Private Ryan, right down to the shaky long-lens battle footage, but without the slickness: schmaltzy, gory, and crude. Directed by Kang Je-gyu.
The eminent German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler ("as big as Toscanini, maybe even bigger") undergoes a postwar grilling by a hammerheaded American major about his alleged affiliation with the Nazis: "I'm going to get that fuckin' bandleader!" A stagy statement of complex issues (adapted, after all, from a play by Ronald …
South Korean creep show, directed with precision and patience by Kim Jee-woon. The few frights, as distinct from multiple perplexities and irritants, could take a day or two off your life.
Navy commandos on a mission of mercy in darkest Nigeria: a two-faced action film that wants to salute the might of the American military at the same time as it wants to salute American individualism. (To say nothing -- and the less said the better -- of American conscience and …
One of those sequels that's really more of a remake, T3 tells pretty much the same story as T2, a time-travelling robot (correction: "cybernetic organism") reprogrammed to serve as protector rather than terminator of humanity's future savior, and a more advanced, shape-shifting, "anti-Terminator Terminator" hot on their trail. That the …
The remake by Marcus Nispel (who?) is a testament to the demands of 21st-century moviegoers to have their horrors (or their anything else) in a style to which they are accustomed: desaturated color, shafts of light, a hammering monotony of closeups, fashion-model damsels in distress, a pair of softball boobs …
Essentially an R-rated Afterschool Special about the junior-high perils of conformism, cliquism, peer pressure, piercings, thongs, drugs, and all the rest, but especially drugs. More specifically: how a "nice" girl (Evan Rachel Wood, ever so nice in Little Secrets), a sensitive poet and a pal to the studious quiet Asian …
A closed-off psychologist, in deference to his father's Last Wish, accompanies the coffin to the scene of a childhood tragedy, where he unburies the past while at the same time treating an enigmatic amnesiac. (The lead role passes back and forth between Guy Pearce and a teenager who looks nothing …
Time-travel tomfoolery, from a novel by Michael Crichton, wherein a team of archaeologists, together with three ex-Marines for security, are sent back to the 14th-century site they are currently excavating in the French countryside. What a treat for them! — if only they were not on a desperate rescue mission …