Peacocky costume piece with an insufferably self-satisfied Fabrice Luchini in the titular role of the 18th-century French wit, playwright, magistrate, periodic political prisoner, duellist, spy, gun-runner, great lover, voice of liberty, and all-around fascinating fellow. The script comes with an intriguing pedigree, traceable to an unproduced and unpublished play by …
A supposed "showcase" for a large ensemble of New Generation actors, not all of them as new as they need to be for their ten-year high-school reunion (in the dead of the Massachusetts winter!). Scott Rosenberg's glib, stilted, writerly dialogue -- to do with the ongoing growing pains at the …
Above-averagely attractive thing, more like. Good-looking thing, for sure, with some of the deepest, wettest, Pop Artiest reds and blues seen on screen since the 1960s work of Jean-Luc Godard (or of Jerry Lewis). The first film of Hettie Macdonald, who had directed the original Jonathan Harvey play on the …
A Secret Admirer comes out boldly into the open: a withdrawn, eccentric, dilettante floral arranger (he delivers his creations in person: "I just like to see people's faces") whose heart goes out to a sad face -- a pretty face, too, rest assured -- seen through a second-story window in …
A murder mystery for only part of the way, after which it applies itself to outlying areas of moral curiosity and courage, and demonstrates thereby that emotional complexity is a satisfying substitute for the idle tricksiness and foggingness we are more accustomed to in the crime field. It puts us, …
Interlocked and overlapping stories, joined together through the roamings of a ruminative film director: "I only discovered reality when I began photographing it." (The actor in the part, John Malkovich, can make a hello sound like a difficult thought.) A tensionless collaboration between two compatible Gloomy Gusses, the infirm eighty-something …
Although snugly at home in the burgeoning genre of the food film (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, etc.), this is much more food for thought than food for tummy, an "issues" movie about the artist versus the businessman in the American marketplace. The metaphor for this takes the amusing …
Cut-rate caper film (both film and caper are cut-rate) about a transparent scam to separate a bum-kneed third baseman from his $130,000 insurance settlement. If this devout Catholic ("Forgive me, Lord, but I've indulged my wife in pursuit of carnal fulfillment -- again") were disposed to fund the church renovations …
Even filmmakers of the status of Nichols and May (director Mike, writer Elaine) follow the crowd and go for inspiration to the French, and they do not go for something recherché: the low-brow gender-bender farce La Cage aux Folles. The major makeover: in order to "explain" why an engaged couple …
A risky title for a movie, particularly for a dish of sentimental tripe about a peewee prestidigitator who has Whoopi Goldberg for a put-upon foster mom and Gerard Depardieu for an imaginary playmate. The playmate eventually expands his repertoire to imaginary dance partner, imaginary family therapist, imaginary educator, imaginary moralizer. …
I feel like I'm in a bad Tales from the Crypt episode, notes the wisecracking P.I. on a missing-person case. He's almost right. It's a bad Tales from the Crypt feature film, a pun-happy romp in a mortuary-cum-whorehouse (hence, "getting stiff among the stiffs," and so forth), whose madam is …
A fledgeless lark involving three callow lunkheads embarking together on lives of crime. The debuting director is Wes Anderson, who affects jazzy, jaunty, New Wavy mannerisms which of course by this time are pretty Old Wavy, or Shore Drifty. And he favors squared-up and steam-pressed compositions for a homely deadpan …
One hundred and fifty-nine minutes are a very long sit when it takes only one or two to turn against a movie. The floating, bobbing, yawing camera, intermittently going woozily out of focus, is as immediately irritating as the one in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. And the mud-in-your-eye monochrome …
Peppy, bustling, highly mobile action film — all over the Southwest desert on the trail of a couple of purloined nuclear weapons. Hong-Kong-to-Hollywood émigré John Woo, if not quite the master that his cult followers would have us believe, is at least a tireless laborer, and his movie is abuzz …