Sponsored, if that's the word, or endorsed, by Jodie Foster, this French film introduces American audiences to Mathieu Kassovitz, one of the many spawn of Martin Scorsese, farther-flung than most, documenting twenty-four volatile hours in the lives of three angry young men in the housing projects outside Paris. In significant …
The second feature film to be directed by Jodie Foster (this time behind the camera only) is a moderately eccentric comedy about the horrors of a Thanksgiving family gathering. The material is sufficiently universal that, at some point or points, it is bound to come within tickling distance of just …
You might not think a film that opens with a bank heist gone bad during a water riot in future-dystopia LA would turn out to be a tender-hearted relationship drama, but pay attention: among the first things we see star Jodie Foster do are take a drink and look mournfully …
John Irving's stomach-upsetting mixture of anarchic comedy and sententious philosophy has put director Tony Richardson into his rompish Tom Jones mood: fast-motion for humorous effect, music by Jacques Offenbach, Daumier-esque caricature. Irving might well feel flattered, though he is hardly well served, except perhaps by the visualization of Susie the …
Unabashedly commercial enterprise from Spike Lee, a lightweight heist-and-hostage caper with a heavyweight cast: Clive Owen as the bank-job mastermind, Denzel Washington as the New York cop who catches the call, Jodie Foster as the smugly enigmatic free-lance troubleshooter with friends in high places ("My bite's much worse than my …
A don't-worry-be-happy movie. Complacently anti-intellectual, and a fount of comfort for the low achiever, it tells the tale of an ulcerous child prodigy named Fred (what would you expect him to be named? Chad? Eric? Trevor?), whose talents range from poetry to the piano to math to physics, so as …
‘This is a true story.” The presence of this disclaimer (or a reasonable variation thereof) at the outset of a picture suggests a license to speak truth to power. But a corking yarn without a storyteller to spin it is a recipe for a flat soufflé. On paper, The Mauritanian …
Facetious Western travels through the familiar landscape of the genre, albeit with the figures in the landscape masked in inexplicable shade under bright sunshine and in mushy, brownish photography. It bypasses, meanwhile, the familiar moods, attitudes, emotions ("Amazing Grace" will get sung at a graveside, but only in jest), en …
Director Jodie Foster’s latest is one long series of narrative gotchas masquerading as moral or intellectual sophistication before finally revealing that it offers nothing more than world-weary sentimentality. (I guess after you’ve gutted everything else — moral outrage, systemic corruption, media vampirism, basic human decency, the plight of the common …
A Wild Child tale, slow-moving and overcautious, concerning a backwoods Carolina hermit (Jodie Foster), sole surviving half of a brace of twins, and speaker of her own private language. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it develops into simply another chapter in Hollywood's continuing romance of the simple and the primitive: the local doctor …
When a reclusive marine biologist is lost at sea off his own private island, his motherless little girl (having picked up none of his Scots accent even though he’s the only person in her life) turns for help to the Indiana Jones-y fictional hero of a series of adventure novels. …
After his Fight Club, The Game, and Seven, David Fincher's next step is apt to seem a rather modest and old-fashioned thriller: a straightforward damsel-in-distress thing, two damsels to be exact, a well-compensated divorcée with mild claustrophobia and her diabetic daughter, holed up together in an impregnable secret chamber -- …
A remake of Manhunter, 1986, for the sole purpose of instating the "real" Hannibal Lecter -- Anthony Hopkins -- in the role. (It would have been simpler, if it would have been technologically possible, to cut-and-paste him digitally into the pre-existing film, obliterating Brian Cox.) And never mind that the …
Woody Allen doing a takeoff on F.W. Murnau and the German Expressionists in general, with shades of the "white" horror of Dreyer's Vampyr, plus his more customary dashes of Bergman (a travelling circus with a Swedish-accented magician). The black-and-white photography by Carlo di Palma is highly (if also drily, academically, …