Anomalous animated film, autobiographical in nature. The premise has Israeli documentarist Ari Folman delving into his repressed memories of the Lebanon War twenty years earlier, in particular his role as a foot soldier in a massacre at a Palestinian refugee camp. Drawn in a “realistic” comic-strip style, Judge Parker as …
Nerd’s daydream of getting out from under one’s pencil-pushing job, one’s bossy boss, and one’s cheating girlfriend, finding out it’s in one’s genes to be an elite assassin, learning the tricks of the trade in nothing flat, e.g., guiding bullets telekinetically, intercepting enemy bullets in midair, and so on. (A …
Topical satire on privatized warfare in the Middle East, “satire” being defined as a fictional form that depends on your political sympathies overriding your aesthetic standards. Even if your sympathies are in perfect alignment, however, this one seems a complete misfire, resorting to fisheye lenses for comic emphasis, mock-Morricone spaghetti-Western …
Quiet, stagnant, morose road movie, really a pit-stop movie, in which a waifish wayfarer from Indiana — a total blank of a character — gets stranded in Oregon en route to Alaska when her car breaks down and her dog goes missing. A few graceful tracking shots amid the tacky …
Gay musical fantasy, inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but deflated by the amateurish acting, the substandard digital image, the all-over poverty. Tanner Cohen, Wendy Robie, Judy McLane, Nathaniel David Becker, Zelda Williams, Jill Larson; directed by Tom Gustafson.
What passes in the early 21st Century as a “rom-com.” (The very term drips with derision: not fully romantic, not fully comic.) It pairs perfect strangers in a drunken impulse wedding in Sin City, whence they return to Manhattan with $3 million in disputed winnings (a contrivance copied from Larry …
Hollywood Semi-Confidential: a fictionalization of producer Art Linson’s chatty, catty tell-all. (The bearded, overweight Alec Baldwin, for example, becomes a bearded, overweight Bruce Willis, “as himself.”) The producer protagonist is curiously undercharacterized — though heftily embodied in Robert De Niro — and the fictionalizing renders the whole thing less personal …
With his wife pregnant — ostensible premise for wanting a safer world — Morgan Spurlock takes his camera on a quixotic quest for the world’s Most Wanted man, or more ambitiously a quest for peaceful coexistence. As in Super Size Me, he strives for a tone of Michael Moore-ish impudence, …
German dramatization of an incendiary wartime diary published at the end of the Fifties by “Anonyma,” an account of the Russian occupation after the fall of Berlin. Filmmaker Max Färberböck narrows his gaze, and ours, to a single neglected facet of the war: the ancient and abiding practice of mass …
We close on a disclaimer that jokingly reads, “No musicians were harmed during the making of this film.” While it’s true that no member of this elite corps of unsung studio pros known as the Wrecking Crew ever went broke performing backup on thousands of recognizable pop tunes from the …
It was a stroke of fortune if not of genius for filmmaker Darren Aronofsky to cast Mickey Rourke in the title role of Randy “The Ram” Robinson (né Robin Ramzinski), a Dodge Ram-driving, self-described “old broken-down piece of meat,” two decades past his prime, yet persisting in plying his trade …
Six years after the termination of the TV series (ten years after the mid-run movie), we find that Mulder the Believer and Scully the Skeptic have cut all ties to the FBI, the latter now a practicing physician at Our Lady of Sorrows, the former in retirement as a bearded …
Adam Sandler’s Israeli accent (plus his stammering multiple negatives: “No-no-no-no-no”) seems like a sufficient base for a spy comedy revolving around a hirsute agent of Mossad, a sort of anti-Munich if you please. But the jokes stray a long way off the base and in diverse directions: the hero’s superhuman …