Boys, girls, 60mm lenses (in the case of Amber Heard, one can make allowances for suffocating anamorphic close-ups), even snakes love Mandy Lane. She’s the hottest high schooler this side of Cybill Shepherd’s Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show and this is the summer that Mandy blossoms. But at …
Inflated remake of the Robert Penn Warren Pulitzer-winner, with the pseudonymous "Willie Stark" as Louisiana governor Huey Long, and Oscar-winner Sean Penn as Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford. Penn, sporting a Trotskyite haircut as the backwater populist politician ("Ain't nobody ever helped a hick 'cept a hick hisself"), speaks in an accent …
The slobbiness inherent in the subject -- women's professional wrestling -- is not as overwhelming as might be feared. For all the undoubted appeals to T-&-A fanciers, and for all the distant Rocky parallels played up in the ads, this turns out to be a surprisingly downbeat comedy, with a …
The most sensational celebrity kidnapping this side of Patty Hearst become this year’s most controversial movie. J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer) was the richest man that ever lived. What shocked the world more than the actual kidnapping and subsequent unharboring of his grandson’s (Charlie Plummer) ear was gramp’s famously unfavorable …
Not a sequel to Knives Out, thank you God, but a bracing espionage adventure that flies in direct opposition to the strains of comic book calamities and celebrity impersonations currently curdling multiplex arteries. We open in a roomful of heavyweights — Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce, Thandiwe Newton, and Chris Pine …
The movie version of the Carl Bernstein-Bob Woodward book betokens the promotion of mild-mannered Clark Kent to the hero's role, protector of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. This post-Watergate permutation of the newspaper genre clings to plenty of starry-eyed ideas (Gordon Willis's lighting, for instance, sets up an overstated …
From the Cormac McCarthy novel, a post-WWII cowboy movie, not quite a purebred Western, a little like The Hi-Lo Country. A little (including in that scope the scrumptious Penelope Cruz), but not a lot. And it is, whatever its constitution, more than director Billy Bob Thornton can chew. The opening …
A small-town Carolina Casanova (Paul Schneider, an unstunning facial composite of Cruise and Costner) takes a shine to one of his buddies' all-grown-up but virginal sister (Zooey Deschanel, with her druggy, draggy, warped-record delivery, turning every line into an exercise in eccentricity, an adventure in affectation): "She makes me decent." …
High-school coach and athlete both hope to use the Big Game as their ticket out of a small Pennsylvania steel town. The drama spun around this situation is modestly, even humbly, understated. (That the teen hero is a hard-nosed cornerback, not quarterback, and the coach is up for a job …
Independent filmmaker Jon Jost -- a one-man team of director, writer, photographer, editor, and pseudonymous musical scorer -- here enters, or approaches, the commercial mainstream (an American Playhouse production) without abandoning his art-movie gimmicks, devices, "strategies": a flat, frontal composition of the back of a spectator's head eclipsing a painting …
Colin Hanks’s documentary about the rise and fall of Tower Records wants you to understand that it was not merely the digital devilry of file-sharing services like Napster that killed the once-mighty retail chain. But it’s so busy pointing a fascinated camera at founder Russ Solomon’s good-times-good-friends-good-music early days with …
Santa claws his way through this '80's-style homage to slasher films.
In Mumbai, Nurse Prabha's routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. A trip to a beach town allows them to find a space for …
Documentary covering the world of electronic sports, aka (in this case) video games with a stadium full of spectators.