A hiatus of nine years since Kimberly Peirce’s first feature, the gender-bending Boys Don’t Cry, is practically like starting from scratch. And blended into a crowd of Iraq War films, this bring-the-troops-home agitation (“With all due respect, sir, fuck the President!”) is not designed to claim the same attention. The …
The debut of writer-director Bryan Bertino is a lowbrow (and low-blow) Funny Games, “inspired by true events,” centered on a romantically rocky young couple (so, don’t feel too bad for them, Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman: they were miserable already) terrorized by ghostly now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t masked intruders at an isolated summerhouse. The …
Director David Ayer, from an original story by James Ellroy, stages a dirty-cop mud wrestle, strident, obvious, hyperbolic, and hypocritical, one cop dirtier than another, one actor badder than another, making Dirty Harry look, in relation, like new-fallen snow and making Clint Eastwood look like God. The vodka-swigging, trigger-happy Keanu …
Seeing that the spaghetti Western owes a debt to the samurai film — Fistful of Dollars, anyway, owes a debt to Yojimbo — cult director Takashi Miike takes things an illogical step further: a Japanese takeoff on the Italian horse opera, with the actors speaking barely intelligible English. It’s a …
Three French siblings scattered around the globe (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, Jérémie Renier, in order of prominence on screen) must dispose of the valuable family estate, including a couple of Corots and Redons, after the sudden death of their seventy-five-year-old mother (Edith Scob, still elegant even if a long way …
Disorganized digital documentary on the nomadic Paskowitz family, eight boys, one girl, born on the road after their father, a twice-divorced Jewish doctor since remarried to a Mexican Indian, dropped out of conventional society in the late-Fifties to pursue his bliss: surfing, screwing, proselytizing. Then the children began to grow …
Neo-Capra political fable (the cusswords are a large part of the “neo-”) about a Regular Joe in Texico, New Mexico, who, through a Byzantine conspiracy of events, holds the single decisive vote in the Presidential election, subjecting him to round-the-clock media scrutiny and personalized campaigns from both parties. The shiftiness …
The erudite title, when pronounced correctly, is an obvious play, not to say a meaningful play, on Schenectady, New York, the main setting of the film, where a regional stage director of high pretension and acute hypochondria gets left behind by his wing-spreading painter wife and their young daughter, then …
Charmingly sincere fairy tale of forgiveness, revolving around a kingdom known for its soup, the dark days that befall it, and its truthful, fearless, chivalrous deliverer, an undersized mouse with oversized ears and ego. A magnificent cast if you could see them, if, that is, they weren’t hidden behind stiff …
First-time director, co-writer, and co-producer Helen Hunt confers a nice big fat role on Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt, at an age when roles of any size are fast drying up. (A do-it-yourself movie.) The forty-four-year-old leading lady portrays a thirty-nine-year-old teacher whose biological clock has started ticking loudly. In rapid …
Three-part anthology of fantastical short tales of small impact, set in the Japanese metropolis, two parts by French filmmakers (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax) and one by a Korean (Joon-ho Bong). They could be set anywhere. They could be shorter, too. The middle one by Carax is perhaps the most fully …
The directing debut of the screenwriter of American Beauty, Alan Ball, concerns itself, in a bland beige image, with the sexual experiences of an Arab-American eighth-grader in suburban Houston during the first Gulf War, and with little else. Sex and the Single-Minded Girl: pubic shaving, first period, girlie magazines, masturbation, …
Three best friends - Ricky, Bubbles, and Julian - live in a Nova Scotia trailer park and are always trying to make money, do drugs, and stick together.
Espionage interlaced with education. A range of Muslim beliefs and attitudes emerges in the course of an FBI crackdown on a terrorist network. Fiercely acted by all concerned (Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Neal McDonough, Jeff Daniels), but rather frivolously resolved, and the camera is prone to excitability at …
The glorified delivery man has been coerced into chauffeuring a freckled Ukrainian redhead to Budapest and beyond, strapped with an irremovable bracelet that will explode if he strays seventy-five feet from his Audi. Jason Statham offers himself up as an alternative to the rougher James Bond of Daniel Craig, together …