At a swank European estate that is mainly a golf course, bored heiress Kirsten Dunst wanders, frets, bathes, and has sex in a sand trap (but not with her dull new groom). Her impish father (John Hurt) steals silver spoons. Kiefer Sutherland has tantrums, Charlotte Rampling is bitter, Charlotte Gainsbourg …
A great film based on a masterpiece. Polish director Lech Majewski uses Pieter Bruegel’s grand The Procession to Calvary in Vienna to open up its world. At the same time, the actors and vignettes seem to fold into the painting, achieving a hybrid beauty and late-medieval power. Not much talk, …
Low-profile science fiction, so light on the hardware, the décor, the couture of the genre, so mundane in all its trappings, as to skirt classification, operating in a borderland, a no-man’s-land, occupied by the likes of On the Beach, Lord of the Flies, maybe Daniel Petrie’s Resurrection, maybe Todd Haynes’s …
Lurid but not quite trashy thriller from director Francis Lawrence, who puts his Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence through trials that never made it into their previous, PG-13 collaboration. It’s not just the rape and torture — though there is that, along with a nude scene that serves nicely as …
Lurid but not quite trashy thriller from director Francis Lawrence, who puts his Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence through trials that never made it into their previous, PG-13 collaboration. It’s not just the rape and torture — though there is that, along with a nude scene that serves nicely as …
Director Ritesh Batra’s adaptation of Julian Barnes’s my-theme-is-memory novel serves as a grand showcase for star Jim Broadbent as a sour old soul who is ever so gently forced to reckon with his past, and a smaller showcase for Charlotte Rampling as the long-ago lover who has very little interest …
As almost all critics have said, and have trouble thinking of anything else to say, this is Woody Allen's 8 1/2 (actually his 9 unless you want to give him half credit for What's Up Tiger Lily? and make it his 9 1/2). It is the same style applied to …
The kind of big-theme fiction film that might expect to receive some brownie points in advance. Certainly Norman Jewison is that kind of filmmaker: In the Heat of the Night, F.I.S.T., And Justice for All, A Soldier's Story, Agnes of God, etc., etc. But the original novel by Brian Moore, …
Slick commercial venture, from François Ozon, with a strong sense of place, weather, character, clothes, as well as a strong sense of humor, several cheesy plot turns, and several square yards of female flesh. It concerns a dried-up British mystery novelist (Charlotte Rampling, whose square yards of flesh are now …
A grown-up French film -- for grown-ups and about them -- on the subject of coping with loss. The loss, in this case, of a thick, slow, tired husband (Bruno Cremer) who, after twenty-five years of marriage, goes out for a swim on a seaside holiday and doesn't return. The …
The focus of this David-vs.-Goliath courtroom drama is on the plaintiffs' attorney (the David figure) in a morally straightforward medical malpractice suit. What we have here is no extraordinary lawyer in the Perry Mason mold, nor even an ordinary one. What we have instead is a walking-talking wreck. The setting-up …