A couple of Iowa missionaries in China take the long and scenic route home on the Beijing-to-Moscow rail line, and the along the way fall in with drug runners. Director Brad Anderson tames his shaky camera for some recognizably Hitchcockian suspense sequences. With Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, Eduardo Noriega, Kate …
Two little Seoul sisters are abandoned by their mother, shunted off first to their aunt, then to their grandparents. The fixation on the girls’ faces piles on the pathos, transforming the “touching” into the arm-twisting. With Hee-yeon Kim, Song-hee Kim, Mi-hyang Kim; directed by So Yong Kim.
Major-studio satire on a major-studio Vietnam War epic. The slipshod plotting, the willful misinformation about how movies are made, and the pandering to the groundlings do not close off all avenues of inspiration. Four fake trailers at the top of the movie, introducing the motley cast of the movie-within-the-movie, give …
Window on the world: sheepherding on the windswept Kazakhstan steppe, and all the dead lambs you’d ever hope to see. But it’s a dirty window, dulling, monotonizing, and a rattly window. With Askhat Kuchinchirekov, Samal Yeslyamova, Ondasyn Besikbasov, and Tulepbergen Baisakalov; directed by Sergey Dvortsevoy.
Teen vampire romance from the popular series of girls' books by Stephenie Meyer, a sort of Nancy Drew — Vampire Lover. It merits a modicum of credit for attempting to bring some virgin blood to a tired old genre: the nonnuclear vampire family, having settled in the rural Northwest for …
Patricia Riggen’s illegal-immigrant ordeal is a virtual heart-tugging machine, tugging on it at regular and frequent intervals, so that you learn, like an experimental rat, to cringe in anticipation. The agony begins immediately. A camera-friendly single mom (Kate del Castillo) in East L.A., making her weekly payphone call to her …
The filmmakers (director Gregory Hoblit, a trio of scriptwriters) wish to “comment” on the ghoulish appetite of the American public while simultaneously feeding it. They have set up a demonic, taunting, diabolically clever (etc.) serial killer in a Portland basement, from where his tortures and murders are “streamed live” over …
Bryan Singer recounts the last and most nearly successful of the fifteen known plots to assassinate Hitler, not counting the fictitious one in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, from the Geoffrey Household novel, Rogue Male. We know beforehand that the plot must fail, despite having Tom Cruise on board as Col. …
Anti-terrorist exploitation to do with an apparent assassination of the U.S. President on Spanish soil on the eve of a peace accord, but an actual assassination of his look-alike: “Sir, we’ve used doubles since Reagan,” a page out of Saddam Hussein’s playbook, and the terrorists know that playbook backwards and …
You can’t claim that Woody Allen’s rapid rate of production doesn’t show. Even the title of this one sounds more like brainstorming for a title than like a final decision: three names off the chalkboard of keywords. Vicky and Cristina, two separate people, are dissimilar American friends, the first pragmatic …
Pretty self-explanatory. About all the title leaves out are the names of the four lower-echelon standup comics on the barnstorming tour organized and hosted by Vince Vaughn (alphabetically, Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco) as well as the names of the thirty stopping points on their itinerary, …
Deep absorption, at the start, in the enclosed world of a dour Connecticut college professor, the classroom, the private office, the school cafeteria, the empty hours at home where, to fill the void left by his late wife, a concert pianist, he tries desultorily to master the instrument himself, late …
Pronounced “dubya.” Oliver Stone’s diplomatic biopic on our forty-third President (Josh Brolin, a dead-on impression, but where to go with it?) is so careful to avoid bias as to avoid purpose. It barely matches the caliber of a TV docudrama, much less the compensating snickers. In that department, Thandie Newton …
Summer vacation after high school and before college: a romance blossoms between a teenage dope peddler and his classmate client, and a bond of friendship forms between the former and the latter’s father, a crazy mixed-up psychiatrist. The action is set back in 1994, but that’s no excuse for the …
Relentlessly sentimental science fiction about a cute anthropomorphized “male” robot — a rattletrap contraption of binoculars atop tank treads — programmed to pick up garbage on an evacuated Earth in the 28th Century (his name is an acronym of Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class), all alone on the planet but …