Breezy Brazilian romantic comedy, a piece of fluff, a mere wisp, beginning with travelogue shots of Rio (a rainbow over the bay, soccer on the beach, etc.) and ending with the stock scene of a lover's mad dash to the airport. In between, there's one amusing bit of an adult-education …
Weepie about a sheet of fabric softener in a tumble-dryer of emotion. The sheet (Outdoor Fresh Scent) is Gwyneth Paltrow, a willowy widow whose husband went down on Infinity Flight 82 out of O'Hare. Then, a year later, along comes a Tall Dark Handsome Stranger (Ben Affleck, Mr. Nonchalance) who, …
Licia Maglietta, a more loosely wound and comfortably upholstered Natalie Wood, warm and womanly, with a lived-in face and body but an undimmed sparkle, plays a Pescara housewife and intermittent klutz who gets separated from her tour group, including her husband and teenage son, while fishing an earring out of …
Peppy youth film on competitive cheerleading, with neither the nerve to play it straight nor nerve to play it snide. A wobbly compromise. And a nimbly diplomatic performance by Kirsten Dunst. With Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union; directed by Peyton Reed.
Writer-director Greg Berlanti brings to the West Hollywood gay scene a knowing eye, a glib tongue, a support-group shoulder: "I was left for a trainer named Dash. I was left for a punctuation mark!" More informational, perhaps, than entertaining ("OGT" is code for "obviously gay trait," and so on), but …
Two engaging young actresses, Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall, in an unengaging, smug, heavy-handed, lead-footed satire set at a homosexual-deprogramming facility (girls wear pink, boys blue) called True Directions. With Cathy Moriarty, RuPaul Charles, Bud Cort, Mink Stole; directed by Jamie Babbit.
Maudlin loss-of-innocence tale about the coming of the Spanish Civil War to a Galician village -- it doesn't arrive there until the movie is ending -- and specifically to a saucer-eyed little boy who learns a lot, but not enough, from his free-thinking old schoolmaster. The episodic narrative, adapted from …
The sloganeering title figure ("I'm a prophet against profit!" "Celibate for celluloid!" etc.) abducts at gunpoint a bratty Hollywood superstar called Honey Whitlock. And in short order, he ungently "persuades" her to join his band of underground-cinema guerrillas -- The Sprocket Holes -- on a hit-and-run production titled Raving Beauty, …
S-f sickie to do with a serial killer who drowns women on camcorder, bathes the bodies in bleach for a doll-like finish, and masturbates over them while suspended from fourteen steel rings piercing his dorsal flesh. What makes it science-fictional and not just high-tech is the red-licorice body stocking that …
The overhaul of the late-Seventies TV series is, in essence, M:I-2 plus T&A.; The Mission: Impossible element comes clear in the opening sequence when, by and by, the Steadicam gives up roving the aisles of an airborne jetliner and settles down in front of an African-garbed LL Cool J, who, …
It would be nice -- it would be bliss -- if this, at eighty-odd minutes, were three times as good as any of the half-hour Wallace and Gromit shorts issued from the same British claymation studio, Aardman. Things don't work like that. An hour and a half is not a …
Another art-house food film: an agnostic chocolate-maker opens her Little Shop of Temptations during the Lenten fast. Director Lasse Hallstrom follows his discreet pro-choice propaganda (The Cider House Rules) with a smug, complacent, liberal-minded broadside against the smugness, complacency, and narrow-mindedness of a French-Catholic provincial village circa 1959. The motley …
Boyhood best friends, one of whom has moved away and grown up to become a hot-shot music executive in L.A., while the other has stayed a child in every respect but inches. The problem: he still wants to be best friends. A glimmer of an idea, there. But the heart …
Korean folk tale of the 18th Century, concerning the governor's son and the courtesan's daughter: "Our enemy is not a person. The enemy is the class that divides us." The illustrational imagery is prettily lit in tones of peach, apricot, salmon. But the imagery is routinely dominated, overriden, trampled down, …