A French cartoon by Sylvain Chomet, a bande dessinée in motion, a genuine novelty. The detachable introduction presents a retro Thirties black-and-white musical pastiche (complete with scratches on the emulsion for wear and tear), faux-Fleischer and semi-surrealist, spotlighting a big-butted Josephine Baker in a bikini bottom of bananas and a …
Unmythic contribution to the classic Japanese martial-arts genre. It skimps on action and piles up, instead, the domestic problems of a modest master swordsman of the mid-19th Century, widowed, deep in debt, burdened with a senile mother, two little girls to raise, tattered clothes, and b.o. An assassination assignment in …
Zombies in Australia, not too different from zombies in Pennsylvania, but spoofier. Low-low-budget and low-low-brow. Photographed all in blue, violet, lavender. With Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins, and Lisa Cunningham; written, directed, produced, and edited by the Spierig brothers, Peter and Michael.
The distilled essence of Chick Flick, right down to the gender of writer-director Audrey Wells: a free adaptation of the Frances Mayes memoir of a San Francisco divorcée who inherits a ten-day gay tour of Italy (Gay and Away) from a pregnant lesbian no longer willing to fly, and who …
Kate Beckinsale (The Last Days of Disco, The Golden Bowl, etc.), in a remarkable display of range and versatility, makes herself right at home as a music-video Vampirella, dressed in dominatrix black leather, photographed in deep-freezer blue, mired in a moronic blood feud between high-tech vampires and werewolves. Alongside the …
Formulaic if grotesque comedy about the bonding of two Poor Little Rich Girls of staggered ages, the senior of whom is reduced by circumstances to work as the junior's nanny. To be sure, any film starring Brittany Murphy is going to have a degree of grotesquerie -- outsized lips, teeth, …
A "prestige" film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the true story, slickly told, of the martyrdom of an Irish journalist who seems to be the only citizen in the country who cares about the Dublin drug trade: "Somebody's going to have to get after these bastards." Cate Blanchett struggles valiantly to …
Single mom and teen daughter have a very special relationship (Mom: "I love you a million Swedish fish." Daughter: "I love you a million red M&M;'s"), but the daughter still hankers to meet the British father -- Lord Dashwood -- who doesn't even know she exists: "I feel like half …
The opening Emmylou Harris song gives you the brief illusion that you're in for a peak experience. But then down you go -- down to the bottom drawer of digital video -- down to the cesspool of truck-stop hooking. With Emily Grace, Judith Ivey, and Bill Raymond; written and directed …
A trip down Memory Lane, or Memory Back Alley, to the drug-related multiple murder in 1981 in which porn star John Holmes (past his prime) had a hand. It's clear which version of events the movie favors (between the conflicting accounts of scumballs), but the jittery, jumpy, hopped-up acting and …
The strife between humans and mutants edges up to the brink: a bombastic, apocalyptic yet tensionless live-action Marvel comic, thanks (for the tensionlessness) to the anything-goes capabilities of the motley heroes. (A bullet in the brain will heal up in a jiffy.) Rebecca Romijn-Stamos rather upstages and outshines the others, …
Takeshi Kitano's resuscitation of the sightless samurai from the long-running action series of the Sixties into the Seventies. Kitano's blind swordsman -- or, in his acting persona, Beat Takeshi's blind swordsman -- is also a blond swordsman, and only the devotee will know whether the surprise revelation at the end …