Slow, tranquil, mildly austere, richly detailed, and well-photographed documentary on a dedicated teacher, name of Georges Lopez, twenty years in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Auvergne, and now on the brink of retirement. You see real work being done, important work, imperturbably done. You see the surrounding countryside. You see …
Sentimental tale, not too terribly soggy, of a thirteen-year-old violin prodigy, his peasant father, his glamorpuss neighbor in Beijing, and his two teachers, the antisocial first one and the well-connected second one (played by the film's director, Chen Kaige). The soundtrack is studded with staples of the repertory, most surprisingly …
A decently clever kidnap scheme -- it came off like clockwork four times before -- goes haywire when Charlize Theron, her anesthesiologist husband, and her asthmatic daughter deviate disobediently from the script. (Her hiding a scalpel between her hind cheeks, then holding the blade to Kevin Bacon's penis, had not …
An incohesive and indigestible blend of Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Heinlein, besides an incohesive and indigestible blend of hand-drawn animation and CG stuff. The spaceships have masts and sails, like the flying pirate ship at the end of Peter Pan, except that these keep on going beyond the ionosphere, …
Taking its lead from a magazine piece and later a full-blown book by Christopher Hitchens ("He's a sewer-pipe sucker," fumes Al Haig. "He sucks the sewer pipe"), this BBC documentary explores the question of whether Nixon's one-time Secretary of State is prosecutable as a "war criminal" for his role in …
Soporific costume farce, after Marivaux, directed by Clare Peploe, in washed-out color (blown-up 16mm), gashed with nervous little jump-cuts (very short jumps), propped up and hustled along by the music of Rameau. There's a fair amount of alternative-lifestyle titillation: cross-dressing; a woman (disguised as a man) pitching woo to a …
Ostensible remake and update of Charade, but really more of a private party thrown by director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, etc.), who uses the date and place of the Stanley Donen original -- 1963, Paris -- to rationalize a French New Wave theme for the party: …
Jay Russell's treatment of the Natalie Babbitt children's novel posits a backwoods family with a private Fountain of Youth (more than that, a Fountain of Indestructibility), and it weighs the merits of an eternal life ("What we Tucks have, you can't really call living. We just are. We're like rocks …
Effects-laden Jackie Chan comedy about a mere chauffeur, a martial non-artist, who acquires superspy powers through a gadgety suit of evening clothes. (The stuff of fantasy rather than science fiction.) Chan's physical gifts are a little stifled, and the shrewish Jennifer Love Hewitt tramples all over him in the verbal …
Two cuties, Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, battling to a draw (i.e., happily ever after), in the roles of an "environmental warrior" and a "philandering robber baron," more prosaically a community-activist attorney and a Trump-like urban developer. The glowing photography by Laszlo Kovacs has greater gravity: way beyond cute, really …
Always amiable, sometimes actually amusing blaxploitation spoof, more explicitly a Jim Kelly spoof, directed by Malcolm (cousin of Spike) Lee, in a suitably sleazy style. The free-lance hero (Eddie Griffin, practically licking his chops), an atavistic Seventies superdude sporting a 'fro the radius of a medicine ball, but a master …
Walter Hill returns to the arena of his auspicious first film, the boxing arena, but this time inside prison walls instead of subterranean bare-knuckle streetfighting. He has by now hit the age of sixty, a codger by the standards of contemporary Hollywood: Walter Over-the-Hill. And seeing as how he has …
Adrian Lyne, agent provocateur of Lolita, Indecent Proposal, Fatal Attraction, et al., gets out the blackened oven mitts for his réchauffé of Claude Chabrol's adultery-and-murder dish, La Femme Infidèle. The suburban housewife, Constance (get the irony?), contentedly married for eleven years to the head of a New York security firm …
Harsh realities (a broken home, an absent mother, a fickle father, a domineering granny) and lofty dreams (to have a real family, to grow up to be an astronaut) of a cross-eyed eight-year-old in late-Sixties Argentina. The solitary goal of the film is to ensure that the little hero be …
From South Korea, a simple tale of a bratty city boy, a TV and video-game addict, accustomed to trading swats with his irritable mother, but now packed off for a long stay with his rural grandmother, a mute, stooped over at a thirty-degree angle, bearing her burdens with the equanimity …