Nonsequential scrapbook of the short adult life of Brian Jones, founding member of the Rolling Stones, drug abuser, alcohol abuser, power abuser, and swimming-pool fatality at age twenty-seven. The mere glimpses of the better-known Stones, Mick and Keith, and the total absence of their music are severe handicaps. The chief …
Serioso. Molto serioso. Not so much a drama as a diagram, didactic in purpose, of the chain-link interconnections, the slow-burn chain reactions, in the Middle Eastern oil trade. What screenwriter Stephen Gaghan did for the illicit drug business in Traffic, he attempts to do again, as both screenwriter and first-time …
A dish of rueful Jewish humor, pretty much a two-man show, a father-and-son show, written expressly for Peter Falk by Paul Reiser, but written for himself as well, and dripping in shtick, in two contrasting styles: the Method mode of Falk vs. the sitcom mode of Reiser. The generational conflict …
Tommy Lee Jones directs himself in a slight variation on the last act of Lonesome Dove, once more hauling the carcass of a close friend on horseback to his chosen resting place. This time he has the unwilling help of the friend's killer, a carpetbagging Border Patrolman from Cincinnati, who …
Not top-rung Hou Hsiao-hsien. In fact bottom-rung Hou Hsiao-hsien, with surprisingly lackluster color from his trusty cameraman, Mark Lee Ping-bin. The idea of pairing up the same actor and actress (Chang Chen and Shu Qi, both excellent) in three separate stories, set in three separate eras, sounds a good one, …
A new metaphor (preferable to Bedwetter no doubt) for the plight of the misfit, a coming-of-age tale, even a coming-to-confidence tale, concerning a feminine teenage boy (Lou Pucci, a blend of Johnny Depp and Scarlett Johansson) who hasn't yet weaned himself off his thumb. The first feature film of Mike …
Partly, if not equally, stop-motion animator Mike Johnson's Corpse Bride, a voguishly grotesque kiddie film in which all the characters look like reflections in fun-house mirrors, and the worm-eaten title figure is not appreciably more ghastly than the living. Indeed the netherworld boasts more color, albeit garishly expressionistic, than the …
François Ozon carries on in the vein of his immediately preceding and best film to date, 5x2, the reverse-chronology account of marital disintegration. That vein — stopping short of ninety minutes in both instances — evades the campy artifice of his 8 Women and his Water Drops on Burning Rocks, …
Conventional road movie and male-bonding movie despite the unconventional natures of the fellow travellers, a druggy street hustler en route to Hollywood for a career in gay porn, and a pre-op transsexual, a week away from his "reassignment" surgery, who his young companion does not at first realize is a …
Supercool hero in a blisteringly roasty-toasty image. Filling in for the family chauffeur, the "professional driver" (euphem.) gets swept up in the kidnapping of the darling little boy of an anti-drug czar. A trickle of schmaltz, a torrent of slapsticky action. With Jason Statham, Amber Valletta, Alessandro Gassman, Kate Nauta, …
From South Africa, the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Film, 2005. That the simultaneous Oscar for the best nonforeign film went to Crash tells you pretty much all you need to know about the legitimacy of that honor. Writer and director Gavin Hood, adapting a novel by Athol Fugard, demonstrates conclusively …
Simple-minded, fast-talking exposé of the sports-betting racket, a $200-billion-a-year business, so we're informed. Al Pacino, as the operator of a 900-number tout service, is encouraged in his worst excesses; and Matthew McConaughey, as a disabled quarterback who can really pick 'em, is Pacino's disciple in more than one way: "He …
Cheap Korean knockoff of James Bond (complete with John Barry-esque whooping horns), although no Bond villain ever had such a soft spot for his sister, and 007 never had such empathy with one. Cultural differences, possibly, but the ineptitude does not encourage bridge-building. With Jung-jae Lee, Dong-kun Jang, Mi-yeon Lee, …
Warm, moist relationship thing about a battered woman who, with her eleven-year-old daughter in tow, seeks sanctuary on the Wyoming ranch of her unwelcoming former father-in-law and his crippled old ranchhand. Almost as formulaic as a Lifetime Network movie, right down to the relentless hothead boyfriend, the alternative hunky lawman, …