Set in Italy during WWII, American Army Col. Richard Cantwell, is a bona fide war hero who faces news of his terminal illness with stoic disregard. Determined to spend his weekend in quiet solitude, he commandeers a military driver to facilitate what is likely a final duck hunting trip and …
Two-and-a-quarter-hour promo for the Beatles without ever mentioning them by name. A generous, even overgenerous sampler of their songs (thirty-three of them, by the count in the press notes, leaving aside the numberless others that are quoted from or alluded to) has been re-recorded, or "covered" as they say in …
A Third World groin-kicker, eye-gouger, and gorge-riser about an escalatingly bloody rebellion of salt miners. Strong stuff; sheets of dust blowing relentlessly across the screen, Spanish epithets like puerco, cobarde, and hijo de puta popping up throughout the script, Eisensteinian extras in noble poses, Peckinpahian special-effects gore, a passionate score …
Abrid Shine's ode to hardworking police everywhere. In Malayalam with English subtitles.
He's a steel-fisted, but gunless, Detroit police sergeant (demoted from lieutenant), with a Harvard law degree and a '66 Chevy Impala. Scriptwriter Robert Reneau -- who has a few cute ideas, such as a hairdresser named Dee who is prone to alliterate with the fourth letter of the alphabet -- …
The scuzzy but lovable owner of a ramshackle amusement park (Johnny Knoxville), hoping to compete with a newly built corporate theme park, decides to make the threat of physical danger his venue’s biggest attraction. The verdict is in: Knoxville’s first attempt at folding Jackass-style tomfoolery into a narrative structure finds …
Only in a world with democracy and corruption to spare are gangsters treated like movie stars. Director Joshua Oppenheimer set out to explore the “nature of impunity” by offering celebrated Indonesian death squad leaders a cinematic platform on which to reenact their participation in the genocide of 1965 — in …
The Navy granted “filmmakers” Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh permission to play with their toys, and the result is a gung-ho recruitment film that’s as incompetently acted and slapped together as it is propaganda. If the two former stuntmen could direct as well as they fight, the film would kill. …
Maudlin, minibudgeted tale of drug addiction. (The tone is set with the opening slide-show of childhood photos, to the tune of "Paper Doll.") The autobiographical nature of the work makes it more personal for the filmmaker, Rosemary Rodriguez, though not necessarily more interesting for the outsider. With Ana Reeder and …
Asperger’s romance (and high time, too, after Tourette’s, Alzheimer’s, etc., have had a whirl at romance) about a socially handicapped astronomy buff and his pretty upstairs new neighbor, an aspiring children’s writer, in a New York apartment house. Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne, the afflicted and the normal respectively, play …
Forced gay-ety around two men -- a Central Park nature guide and a germophobic psychologist -- who meet up again, without recognizing one another, seventeen years after their disastrous first date. The disaster is of gross-out proportions, a prologue that sets the sustained tone of trying too hard. With Craig …
Animated holiday greeting card — Christmas and Hanukah both — addressed to Adam Sandler's flock: juvenile tastelessness sprinkled with sugar. Besides being the model for the bah-humbug protagonist, Sandler supplies four different voices, all of them irritating in different ways. And the brand names and corporate logos on parade — …
Stagy, kitchen-sinky drama about three generations of women in one Soviet apartment: Grandma is paralyzed; the elder daughter can't get her boyfriend to commit; the younger has gotten herself pregnant; Mom is looking for a life of her own. Another of those heralded "advances" in the Russian cinema which nevertheless …
Husband and wife square off in the courtroom as District Attorney and defense advocate. The emphasis in this juridical battle of the sexes is on "cute" comedy (he summons a tear to his eye at will, he paddles her derriere, etc.). With Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday; directed …
The reteaming of the writer and the director of Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, has produced no less madness but much more method. Or anyhow more meaning. Kaufman, playing fast and loose with the truth, evidently set out in reality (though it doesn't seem his sort of …