If Philip Kaufman has long been overrated (trace the blame to the identically initialed Pauline Kael), this cheesy feminist thriller, fully worthy of the Lifetime Channel, might remedy the problem all by itself. Though intriguing in its initial set-up and directed with care throughout, it takes a suicidal high dive …
Kumal and Sangha by name, two Southeast Asian tigers, separated as cubs, reunited at full growth on opposite sides of the fighting arena. Fine animal footage in a story both sentimental and sadistic. With Guy Pearce and Jean-Claude Dreyfus; directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
David Gordon Green retains the Southern rural naturalism of his George Washington and his All the Real Girls, but adds a jolt of melodrama: a sort of down-to-earth Night of the Hunter, crashingly prosaic and squalid ("Ya wanna smell my armpit?"), about the Bad Brother who covets his late father's …
The brand-name vampire hunter seen as an Indiana Jonesian swashbuckler, armed with a rapid-fire crossbow and saw-toothed boomerangs, rather than an ivory-tower savant: Hugh Jackman in gunslinger's garb rather than Peter Cushing in gentleman's get-up. What Stephen Sommers did for the Mummy, twice over, he now does for a horrific …
Not, please be advised, a throbbing exposé of life at a trendy New York monthly, but just the latest screen treatment of the William Makepeace Thackeray warhorse, a grand-scale pageant of class, snobbery, and hypocrisy in early 19th-century England. As Classics Illustrated go, the illustrations are supremely fussy, cluttered, glutted; …
Mike Leigh's post-WWII portrait of a middle-aged homemaker and housecleaner who performs the occasional abortion on the side: "All right, then, dear, first thing we've got to do is put the kettle on." (Tools of the trade: a cheese grater, a bottle of disinfectant, a bar of soap the color …
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's visualization of a novel by Sebastien Japrisot, a name firmly entrenched in the mystery and suspense genres: The Sleeping-Car Murders, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, One Deadly Summer, others. This one is plainly in the grips of a greater ambition, a WWI-period romance …
Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan painted himself into a corner with The Sixth Sense, and has climbed the walls ever since: Unbreakable, Signs, and now this. His outsized initial success seems to have given him an inflated sense of self-importance, an inflamed sense of mission: not simply to top the sensationalism …
The title and the timber are taken from the 1973 biopic on Sheriff Buford Pusser, but this remake-slash-update-slash-relocation is so generic — cleaning up the gambling, drugs, and corruption in a Northwest mill town — that no attribution was really required. Perhaps it would have been better called Walking Wide, …
Two short stories by Andre Dubus, one of the same name and another named Adultery, are forged into a bludgeoningly dull chamber piece centered on two faculty colleagues, with matching scrubby beards for that academic look, who each have an extramarital affair with the other's wife. Director John Curran's pattern …
Timid political comedy in which the ex-President -- "the most popular in history," despite being the first to be divorced in office -- faces off against a hardware-store owner over the mayoralty of a Maine small town. But the real bone of contention is the hardware man's dangling girlfriend. The …
Essentially an old-fashioned classroom film presented (at a price) in theaters: a team of scientists and scholars, with heavy grounding in quantum physics, take turns explaining how the brain shapes reality. Illustration comes from computer cartoons on a par with TV ads for household cleaners, and a live-action Marlee Matlin …
The team reassembles: Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, Natasha Henstridge, and Kevin Pollak in old-age makeup as his own father (in a manner of speaking). Penalized five yards for a false start, another five for delay of game, and fifteen for unnecessary roughness: too deep a hole. Directed by …
Confusing diagram of a romantic quadrangle. So snarled in its delineation -- shifting points of view, shuffled time sequence, reprised scenes -- as to border on indecipherable. Based on a little-seen French film by Gilles Mimouni, L'Appartement. With Josh Hartnett, Diane Kruger, Rose Byrne, and Matthew Lillard; directed by Paul …