A light doomsday snack, unsatisfying even for the duration. One wonders whether, out of post-9/11 sensitivity, or trepidation, or something, the images of a nuclear blast in Baltimore (at a football stadium where "Chicago" is for some reason lined up against "Florida"), not to mention its immediate aftermath, haven't been …
John Sayles carves a large slice of sociology out of the Florida coast, similar in size to his slices in City of Hope and Lone Star. The blacks, the whites, the developers, the sticks-in-the-mud. Their dreams, their disillusionment, their desperation, their secrets, their scars, their villainy, their integrity, their humor …
The big-screen breakthrough of a five-man comedy troupe collectively called Broken Lizard is a dirt-cheap and piss-poor spoof about the jurisdictional rivalry between a squad of Highway Patrol pranksters and the strait-laced Spurbury Police Department. It's somewhat similar, in both those descriptive adjectives, to such Seventies spoofs as Kentucky Fried …
You can take the girl out of the country -- take her away from her redneck husband, plant her in the Big Apple, launch her on a career as a fashion designer, affiance her to a Kennedy-esque politico -- but you can't take her out of the cliché. Reese Witherspoon, …
Ken Loach again butts his head against the Hard Life, this time that of a wayward lad who hopes to purchase a Clyde-side mobile home for his incarcerated mum, to be financed with drugs stolen from her scumbag boyfriend. The criminal milieu adds little impetus to Loach's normal languor. In …
Diluted update of Lina Wertmuller's Marxist battle of the sexes, 1974. It might, especially in view of the pallid color, have been better retitled Watered Down. And it seems an odd sort of gift for writer-director Guy Ritchie to have devised for his wife and leading lady, Madonna, in that …
More like sinking. A sub-Sundance (meaning Slamdance) independent film by Robert J. Siegel, to do with the plight of a scrub-faced young woman unconcerned about her looks (baggy overalls and T-shirts), trapped in the teeming fleshpot of Myrtle Beach. Her best and evidently only buddy, a professional body piercer all …
Part one of Chan-wook Park's so-called "revenge trilogy," three tales unconnected other than by theme, with the cycle rounded out by Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance -- though the former was the first to be released in the U.S. This one, postponing the thread of revenge until well underway, …
The production banner over Gary Winick's little coming-of-age comedy -- Indigent (or InDigEnt), acronym for Independent Digital Entertainment -- is a commendable example of truth-in-labelling. Poor for sure. Needy indeed. An anemic, myopic image that gets ever blurrier with every inch of distance from the camera, and ever pastier with …
Almodóvar in awe, all over again, of the opposite sex. (Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours, can be spied at one point as bedside reading, and we might well speculate that Almodóvar would have killed to be the filmmaker who brought it to the screen.) The first half, delineating the central …
If not indispensable Kiarostami, unmistakable Kiarostami all the same: driving around in a car for the entire film, the camera peering in over the dashboard during ten separate conversations counted down numerically on screen ("10"... "9"... "8"...). When the first conversation, between a divorced and remarried mother and her voluble …
Dim-lit chiller, with a no-name cast, about childhood "night terrors" made tangible. ("They" are not the gentle beings of the same-named ghost story by Rudyard Kipling.) Not much development, but some effective tightening of screws. Laura Regan, as finely whittled as the young Jamie Lee Curtis, is a credibly distressed …
Four (or so) intersecting plotlines on the themes of the pursuit of happiness and the quirks of fate, but snipped up and patched together so that events that follow each other on screen do not follow each other in chronology. Additional chopping-up and rearranging are achieved through chapter headings excerpted …
Remake of the H.G. Wells classic, directed by the novelist's great-grandson, Simon Wells, whose allegiance is plainly to his own time and not to his illustrious ancestor. The special effects are perhaps not too excessive (nor too special), as compared with the current norm rather than with the George Pal …