Chez Nous, for you monolinguals, is a French expression meaning an Australian household made up of a French husband (the German-accented Bruno Ganz), his Aussie writing wife (Lisa Harrow), the latter's would-be writing sister (Kerry Fox), presently on the rebound from an affair abroad and pregnant ("You know the arguments …
Sofia Coppola, possibly drunk on power after the reception of Lost in Translation, has gained in ambition as an artist without really gaining in confidence as a technician. She has all the costumes her heart could desire, and all the access to Versailles, but her color palette is a bit …
Woody Allen throws his two cents into the alternative-reality forum. Two playwrights, one tragic and the other comic, are sitting in a New York bistro arguing their respective Weltanschauungs, when a tablemate proposes to tell a true story, and let the playwrights decide whether it's a tragedy or a comedy. …
The issue of women's independence formulated in terms that were already old in the green years of Katharine Hepburn, who would be easy to imagine in the central role of a poor girl from the Australian bush country with her head in the clouds of literature, art, music, all the …
David Cronenberg carries on his dubious search to find "straighter," more respectable outlets for his creature-feature schlock tactics: this time, the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, although the movie is not a direct adaptation of it, but rather a reconstruction of the (highly drugged) state of mind …
A judicious pruning job on E.M. Forster's novel of colonial India, trimming and shaping his slow-turning pages into scenes that will "play." And besides scenes that play, there are also the players to play them: not so much Alec Guinness in brownface, but Victor Banerjee (with darkened skin himself), James …
Bah-humbug comedy from the Disney people, titillated perhaps by the kinds and amounts of profanity. A fugitive jewel thief, taking hostages as in Desperate Hours, gets caught in the crossfire of family squabbles on Christmas Eve. Abrasive all the way, and then suddenly and unconvincingly mushy at the end. With …
TV-caliber true story of Australian backstroker Tony Fingleton (who authored the script himself) and of the abusive alcoholic father who favored his other two sons, the freestyler and the no-talent bully. (To judge by his rendition of Chopin on the piano in the parlor, before the bully slams the lid …
A well-to-do English widow (Helen Mirren), touring Italy, flouts convention and marries a much-younger local (Giovanni Guidelli, looking like the young John Derek), a dentist's son who turns out to be far more conventional than his bride ("This is Italy! Married women do not go wandering around alone!"). This interesting …
An enterprising ragamuffin (newcomer Kyle Catlett) from Montana (by way of the director’s The City of Lost Children) takes a road trip. Destination: the lost District of Columbia for a Smithsonian gala in his honor. A halcyon maze, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s shrewdly sweet-tempered surreal fantasyland is an eyegasmic saturnalia of expressive …