A rare sports movie with a brain. Brad Pitt does perhaps his best star acting as Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager who, sick of being looted of talent by big-money teams like the Yankees, opted for a “sabermetrics” approach using computers ands the adviee of a smart, chubby …
A Chechen Muslim enters Hamburg in the guise of a homeless man seeking asylum and captures the attention of intelligence operative Philip Seymour Hoffman’s antiterror unit. Based on a John le Carré novel, this is the sharpest, most reasonable tale of espionage and intrigue since John Boorman’s Tailor of Panama. …
Paris, Je T'Aime crosses the pond. A multi-director box on bonbons, undeveloped little vignettes of male-female relations in the Big Apple. The ghostly segment by Shekhar Kapur stands out from the rest for stylistic reasons, the pallid palette, the persnickety compositions, the oval mirror frame within the frame. Natalie Portman, …
Nine differing women, divided into nine single takes, each around twelve minutes in length, with some crossover of characters from one segment to another. The form itself makes a statement, something about their lives being separate, but equal, but connected. The acting is mostly strong; the writing is sometimes stagy; …
The name is taken from "Ireland's Premier Theatre Company," a tatty itinerant troupe struggling on at the dawn of television, and alighting for the movie's duration in a photogenic village whose own current drama centers around Unwed Mother and Unnamed Father. The development of this is pretty predictable, and it …
Slow and "heavy" Americanization of an egghead detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Like a lot of actors-turned-director, Sean Penn is disposed to dump an emotional load on his actors and watch them stagger around under it awhile. Most of them -- Benicio Del Toro, Patricia Clarkson, Mickey Rourke, Vanessa Redgrave, …
Rob Reiner, who's said to have been wanting to make a movie of the William Goldman novel for many more years than he'd actually been a moviemaker, is not at this point a good enough director to cover up for a not good enough idea: he's still tied too tightly …
Built like a bullet, yet with his mind a cage of wormy lust, greed, and bigotry, cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is far below the LAPD’s finest. Oren Moverman directed as if fiercely merging Colors and Bad Lieutenant, while chief writer James Ellroy overplays his slumming zeal for lowlife crud. …
No one could accuse director Nick Cassavetes of reluctance to trade on his father's name. His first film, Unhook the Stars, was a vehicle for John's widow and frequent star, Gena Rowlands. And this, his second, comes from an unproduced screenplay by John (with a small part for Gena as …
Condensed and Americanized version of Dennis Potter's seven-hour miniseries for British television: an author of "detective novels about a gumshoe who warbles," hospitalized and immobilized with a head-to-toe case of psoriasis, escapes into memory and imagination. The whole thing, not just the sessions with the resident head-shrinker (a disguised Mel …
Director Phil Joanou making like an Irish Scorsese: low-level hoods in Hell's Kitchen (a gentrified Hell's Kitchen now called Clinton), locked together in fuck-you-fuck-you-too repartee, and suffocated in smoky blue atmosphere. Sean Penn (with another new hairdo: black shoe polish and sideburns) is well under control as an undercover cop, …
The Americanization of a BBC miniseries qualifies as a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, and from more than one type of headline: the political sex scandal, the privatization of the military, the death throes of newspapers. The topicality inevitably gives rise to some soapboxing, and along with it some playing on the pieties …
M. Night Shyamalan's encore to The Sixth Sense, a hard act to follow. But follow it he dauntlessly does, all the way to a mandatory Surprise Ending. At first the fearsomeness of the task seems to drive him to overdirection, a big show of being busy: a woozy camera for …
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 …
The long and winding and rocky road of an adolescent foster child after her bohemian mother ("She's an artist. She doesn't care about things like Parents' Night") is imprisoned for murder. A hair-tearing women's picture (hair-hacking and hair-blackening, too), with some authentically messy emotion en route to the triumphal uplift. …