Grim survey of the woman's lot in Iran (especially the woman, for whatever reason, outside the law), shot in a stark, spare, semi-documentary style. Like La Ronde (otherwise a very different movie), it has no one focal character, but keeps passing the baton as in a relay race. It can …
A Western only by the technicality of its setting: California gold country, 1867. Michael Winterbottom, who earlier brought Jude the Obscure to the screen, takes the plot premise from Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, but most everything else from Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller: the jerry-built town, the brothel, the …
Avariciously commercial French comedy of the type that tends to be remade in Hollywood. Francis Veber, its writer and director, amounts practically to a one-man factory of the type. And it's hard to see what could stand in the way of a remake of this one, a PC farce about …
Topical, pot-stirring political melodrama in the vein of Advise and Consent. In fact it tells the same story (pruned of subplots and subordinate characters), with the slight difference that whereas that one was about the midterm nomination of a new Secretary of State, this one is about the nomination of …
Ismail Merchant, the producing half of the Merchant-Ivory team, takes a turn at directing: a mid-Fifties period piece about a dark-skinned, self-deluded Anglo-Indian nurse ("My father was an officer in the British regiment"), who takes over the care of an undernourished Anglo baby, insinuates herself into the household, undermines the …
A mike-frightened would-be songwriter from South Amboy, N.J., moves to Manhattan to pursue her dream among the bumping-and-grinding female bartenders (like exotic dancers without the clothing removal) of the titular nightspot. Flashy, empty puffery. With Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello, Melanie Lynskey, John Goodman, LeAnn Rimes; directed by David …
Ang Lee's hommage to the martial-arts fairy tales of his heritage, especially perhaps to the splendrous period pieces of King Hu, is a beautiful bore. The costumes, the sets, the scenery, the wide-screen photography, the mature leading lady, the China-doll ingénue -- beautiful. The talky script, the uninflected unpunctuated narrative …
Didactic, moralistic, blaringly metaphorical character study of a would-be serious writer who loses himself in the job of a casino dealer. (Fertile ground for themes of chance, risk, cheating, betrayal.) A little thin in atmosphere and opaque in plot, but highly creative in its voice-over narration, the hero relating events …
A groundbreaking "dark" musical by Danish director Lars von Trier -- groundbreaking, anyway, if you have forgotten about, or never knew about, The Threepenny Opera, Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, Carmen Jones, West Side Story, Oliver, Sweet Charity, Catch My Soul, Pennies from Heaven, One from the Heart, Newsies, Demy's …
Illuminating documentary, shot in suitably sooty black-and-white, about homeless squatters in a New York subway tunnel. (Shades of the cannibalistic Undergrounders in the cult British horror film, Raw Meat, a/k/a Death Line.) The sense of subterranean space and spatial relationships is a bit vague, but the camera is well at …
Three-part omnibus on the youth, maturity, and dotage of the Iranian woman, all parts scripted by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (director of Gabbeh, The Silence, et al.), and directed by his wife, Marzieh Meshkini, a graduate, together with their daughter Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple), of the private filmmaking school, since disbanded, known …
A tidy little small-scale low-budget thriller on an apocalyptic theme (same as Fail-Safe, same as Crimson Tide), a bout of nuclear brinkmanship -- or "Showdown in the Desert," as the cable news channel instantaneously christens it -- between the new leader of Iraq (Saddam's son) and the first Jewish U.S. …
Godzilla meets Barney. Or in a word, Aladar, a dino orphan raised by apes and instilled with family values and community spirit: "Stand together!" (How did the species ever die out with him on the team?) The computer-generated imagery is dazzling, the computer-programmed emotion cloying, and the James Newton Howard …