Crime-spree chronicle, set in the Twenties, based on fact. Very lightweight, and heavily dependent on the elusive charms of Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, and Vincent D'Onofrio in underdefined roles: "Just a bunch of please-and-thank-you country boys." (Their main claim to sympathy, if not to fame: they never actually …
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, …
Why strap an anamorphic lens to a camera if you’re not going to use it? For his first film shot in widescreen, visionary director Robert Eggers’s (The Witch, The Lighthouse) repeatedly imagines his Viking Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) glowering back at the audience from center frame and with enough sideroom …
Fear Strikes Out the Great Santini in this “love me daddy” baseball pic that earns points for spending less than 5 percent of its time on the diamond and refusing to end in open competition...so far as the playing field is concerned. We never see the five consecutive wild pitches …
Contrived shit doesn’t get much nuttier. In the not-so distant future, a white, upper-class family plans on spending the Purge — a ‘countrywide catharsis’ where, for one 12-hour period every year, murder is decriminalized — in the safety of their steel-plated mansion. How do you go wrong with a foolproof …
Young love in and for the Nineties -- which apparently entails a preoccupation with the Seventies: TV reruns, goldie oldies, wall posters (Saturday Night Fever, Love Story), memorabilia (Charlie's Angels lunchbox). The script, about a one-for-all-and-all-for-one foursome of college grads, is riddled with observations on the level of "Evian is …
Alejandro Amenábar (The Others) writes, co-produces, and directs a fun cast (Ethan Hawke, Emma Watson, David Thewlis) in a thriller that combines psychology (regression therapy) and religion (ritual Satanic abuse). Hoo!
Director Bruce Beresford, still up from Down Under, continues to try to crash the society of Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor, and the rest, as a chronicler of the Deep South -- in this case, working again with Alfred Uhry, author of Beresford's Driving Miss Daisy, deep in South Carolina. The sound …
Sophisticated but smug comedy of midlife crisis, a not-too-far-from-the-mainstream directorial debut for painter David Salle, about a small-scale wheeler-dealer from provincial Florida who, under the spell of self-help self-hypnosis, wants to leave his mark on the world, wants to do something of permanent value, wants specifically to make a film …
When actor Ethan Hawke hit midlife, he found himself, as he puts it, "struggling with why I do what I do" and wondering about "what is authentic." (He gets that money is not the same as satisfaction or virtue, even going so far as to note that some of his …
At bottom a murder trial of a Japanese-American in the volatile aftermath of World War II. The Australian director Scott Hicks, possibly overanxious to prove that Shine was no fluke, makes sure his hand is busily in evidence: the balusters in the railing of the courtroom balcony, through which one …
Writer-director Robert Budreau presents an account of the events that gave name to the famed, seemingly bizarre Syndrome in which a captive bonds with a captor. If there is a surreal, even unreal quality to the proceedings, well, that’s no accident. First, what starts out looking like a bank robbery …
A man rides a horse across the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. Twenty-five years earlier, both the sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides out to meet him, worked together as hired gunmen. Silva visits him with the excuse of reuniting with …
Copycat serial-killer film. But let's be clear: it's not really the killer who's a copycat -- one of those diabolically clever, games-playing, wits-matching superfiends -- but rather the film itself, with its strained performances, transparent tricks, jack-in-the-box jolts, and palpable, sliceable, spreadable sense of dread. The big influence is Seven, …