Chloë Sevigny blows Vincent Gallo. For real. For maybe, at most, a minute of verifiable screen time, short of completion. There is, to be sure, an actual film before the act of sex: a quasi-Seventies road movie (all the way to a sappy Gordon Lightfoot tune, untruncated, on the soundtrack, …
Mythologizing documentary, although not much of a recruiting film for the agnostic, on the scurrilous poet, novelist, postal worker, boozer, and cult hero, Henry Charles ("Hank") Bukowski, pieced together out of testimonials from friends and admirers (Taylor Hackford, Tom Waits, Sean Penn, Bono, et al.) and candid footage of the …
Co-writers and co-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber offer utterly unrationalized science fiction in the time-travel and alternate-universe subdivisions. It concerns a college student (Ashton Kutcher, with scholarly beard) who had suffered from memory blackouts as a child, and who now discovers that by rereading his diaries he can …
Miss this movie. Teen rock climber, go-kart mechanic, and photographer turn their talents to bank robbery -- flattery will get them everywhere -- in a good cause, of course: a $250,000 surgery in Denmark. (Origin of the movie of which this is a remake.) One could wish the focus were …
An adolescent rube, transplanted with her parents to teeming Rome, faces an array of life-changing choices: communism, materialism, classical music, boys. The filmmaking style is more hectic than it needed to be to convey the confusion. Roberto Benigni and Michele Placido pop up in as-themselves cameos, and Sergio Castellitto is …
Hostage thriller, with a breathless pace and an oxygen-deprived plot, from a story idea by Larry Cohen: a companion piece to Phone Booth, but freed, through the technology of mobile phones, for a lot of car chases and running around. Kim Basinger throws herself, body and soul, into the role …
Namby-pamby apolitical comedy about America's First Daughter, who, on a diplomatic mission to Prague, pulls an Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and gives the slip to the Secret Service on the back of the handiest motorcycle. Unbeknownst to her, the biker (Matthew Goode, like a young Rupert Everett) is an …
Sweet and sentimental French film, a remake of a 1945 one, about the new supervisor — nicknamed Old Baldy — at a school for "difficult" boys, whipping his class into shape as a tight-knit choral group, for one fleeting term in 1949. One of the boys grows up to be …
Holiday comedy, adapted from an anomalous novel by John Grisham (The Firm, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The this, The that), about a suburban couple who opt, after their only offspring has flown the coop into the Peace Corps, to buck the Christmas tradition and resist the social pressures …
The marble-eyed dragonslayer of Pitch Black -- a decent little movie, four years previous -- is enlisted, over his grumbled protests ("I just wanted to be left alone"), to face a bigger challenge: the planet-by-planet blitzkrieg of the Necromongers, otherwise known as the World-Enders, who want to bring everyone, everywhere, …
Laborious reworking of the staple fairy tale in the San Fernando Valley: the high-school football star (Chad Michael Murray, so sensitive that his forehead never smooths out) can't recognize his copiously blond classmate (Hilary Duff) at the Halloween costume party, even though she's hidden behind a mask no bigger than …
Set in Canada, Paris, London, San Francisco, and spoken in English, French, and Cantonese, this Olivier Assayas film contemplates the possibility of change in a person, and gives full, serious, unsentimental attention to the difficulty and uncertainty of such change. The person in question is "a junkie to the bone," …
Constrained kidnap thriller told in parallel action but out-of-step chronology, crosscutting between the teased-out details of an Ohio businessman's abduction ("The man Hertz and Avis are afraid of"), over the course of the first day, and the impact on his family over the numberless days that follow. The why of …
Reekingly urbane Mike Nichols chamber piece, prone to be seen as a long-distance companion to his Carnal Knowledge in its dirty talk and its romantic disillusion. The quartet of players -- two American females, a stripper (but of course) and a portrait photographer, and two British males, an obituarist and …