The house in question, a modest bungalow within a stone's throw of the Pacific, has been inherited by a subsistence-level housecleaner currently undergoing drug rehab, who gets evicted through a bureaucratic error and her own neglect to open her mail. It is then bought for a song at auction by …
Discombobulating experience in the vein of The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride, a defense of books framed in the form of an ugly movie. Is the ugliness deliberate? Designed to send a repulsed viewer to the placid regularity of the printed page? The postulate here has to do with …
Pale imitation of a 1950s soap opera, set in that actual era. The issues are solid (first love, the wrong side of the tracks, the gossip-stained reputation), and the storytelling shows good patience, and the cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, Joanna Going, Billy Crudup, Kathy Baker, Will Patton) …
In outline, it sounds like a children's story an adult could endorse and enjoy. But "in detail" is another matter. A self-absorbed teenager, put out at having to babysit her little brother, invokes the goblins to take him away (she has been rehearsing a play coincidentally called The Labyrinth, about …
In outline, it sounds like a children's story an adult could endorse and enjoy. But "in detail" is another matter. A self-absorbed teenager, put out at having to babysit her little brother, invokes the goblins to take him away (she has been rehearsing a play coincidentally called The Labyrinth, about …
Todd Field's sophomore directing effort, following up his quietly sensationalized In the Bedroom, is less quietly sensationalized, in other words more blaringly sensationalized, and truly more sophomoric. The adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel, complete with a snooty third-person-omniscient (i.e., know-it-all) narrator, undoubtedly tells us less about the malaise of …
Back in the good old days of carte blanche police brutality: L.A. in the early Fifties, in the company of the four felt-hatted musketeers -- the hard-punching untouchables -- of Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn. (The New Zealand director, Lee Tamahori, proven poet of bar fights and …
When they’re not pissing out forest fires, a group of misogynistic oafs sit around listening to heavy metal while debating the intellectual capacity of the bar tramps who agree to sleep with them. The only one who seems to be genuinely happily married is retired firefighter Jeff Bridges. Bridges gets …
It seems a safe bet that Ed Harris would not have been interested in directing himself in the role of the leading light of American Action Painting (notwithstanding his uncanny resemblance to him from the eyebrows up) unless the painter were also a violent alcoholic who could be counted upon …
A grim-and-grimmer urban horror story, from a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., about four drug dependents en route (in a final flurry of cross-cutting) to neatly synchronized rack and ruin. The downward spiral of your dime-a-dozen junkie needs more than new extremes of physical disgustingness -- the gangrene, the two-way …
The adaptation of a nongenre novel by John Burnham Schwartz bears a first-glance resemblance to the Claude Chabrol thriller ca. 1970, This Man Must Die, in both of which a bereaved father tracks down the hit-and-run killer of his young son. But Chabrol's killer, from a genre novel by Nicholas …
A piece of retro science fiction, seemingly rooted up from an early-days issue of Amazing Stories, and set appropriately in the very period, or at the very end of the very period: 1938. You have for starters your straight-arrow hero, a daredevil aviator with never-combed hanks of hair framing his …
A spoof, not of religion but of the bloated excesses of religion in a media-driven, mega-church era. Pierce Brosnan is a suave fundamentalist fool, the Rev. Day. He runs afoul of a righteous aetheist (Ed Harris), thrills a suburban fan (Jennifer Connelly), and bewilders her doofy husband (Greg Kinnear). The …