Ungadgety specimen of science fiction, set in a not too distant future, with primary locations in the Far East and the Middle East, when a global Big Brother keeps a close and censorious eye on human coupling and breeding. While neither very original nor skillful as storytelling, the vision of …
A collection of eleven comic sketches filmed over a period of almost two decades by Jim Jarmusch, all of them involving, if not actually revolving around, coffee and cigarettes (or in one case, tea and cigarettes) and the various restaurant tables on which these are arrayed. Each takes place in …
Director Michael Mann situates Tom Cruise under a silver-fox hair dye in the back seat of a taxi cab crowned by an ad for Bacardi Silver. That matching-color fashion statement says a lot about this sleek, cool, preening, glamorous thriller in the Mann-ly manner (Thief, Manhunter, Heat, not to forget …
Her Highness is exiled from the island of Manhattan to the cultural wilderness of Dellwood, New Jersey, a new world to conquer. The adult perspective (i.e., sardonic condescension, campy ornamentation) doesn't broaden the appeal beyond girls only -- little ones. With Lindsay Lohan, Adam Garcia, Glenne Headly, Alison Pill, and …
If you wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, what do you do for an encore? (Well, after a spin-off TV series, anyway.) How about this? A sex-change operation on Some Like It Hot: two airport lounge singers (sisters of the one in Anything but Love) witness a …
Open-minded examination of the coverage of the Second Gulf War on the Al Jazeera satellite channel. The spokespeople for the Arab news station represent their own viewpoint very well; and as the only critical analysis of their work comes from the likes of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (in press-conference footage), …
Consciousness-raising, conscience-pricking documentary by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, reciting a laundry list, two and a half hours long, of the vices of big business past and present. A rotation of experts (CEOs, Harvard profs, Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, many more) lectures directly to the camera and over …
Spanish-language black comedy, a classification which would still today raise the specter of Luis Buñuel, even without the specific sight of the mannequin in the furnace. (See The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, from the master's Mexican period.) Director Alex de la Iglesia, like other followers in those …
American remake of the imitation-American caper film from Argentina, Nine Queens. No real inspiration, but no desecration, either. Doing it in English has the principal effect of making it sound more like Mamet. John C. Reilly, in specific, sounds like Joe Mantegna: close your eyes and see. With Diego Luna, …
Shorter, straighter-faced, altogether squarer remake of the George Romero zombie bash. The "commentary" on American consumerism, or anyway the locality of a Middle American shopping mall, remains as pertinent today as in 1979, if scarcely as fresh. And the cannibalism now seems to pertain not so much to the society …
Doomsday science fiction -- emphasis, as is only fit and proper, on fiction at the expense of science -- about how global warming brings on a new Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, and in consequence a southward migration that reverses the flow of illegals across the Mexican border. (That …
Grade-school-level sociology lesson disguised, ever so slightly, as satirical science fiction: a mysterious "wall of fog" closes off California from the outside world and inexplicably causes the disappearance of all residents of Hispanic origin, all the way, apparently, to the Spanish-born tenor, Plácido Domingo. This in turn causes Californians to …
First-time director and cinematographer (rare combination) Shona Auerbach builds a façade of realism over an interior of mush. The title figure (Jack McElhone) is a nine-year-old deaf boy who never speaks, yet narrates the action (in an all but unintelligible Scots accent) in the form of letters to his absent …
Modernized biography of songwriter Cole Porter, digging up all the bisexuality that Night and Day in 1946 could not go near. Despite the theatrical device of reviewing his life as a musical show emceed by the Grim Reaper, it remains a rather banal backstage story, lacking much in the way …
Brought to Batista's Cuba by her well-heeled father in late '58, a blond blue-eyed Jane Austen reader (Romola Garai) gets a bit of a Lawrentian thing going with a swarthy young pool boy (Diego Luna, a true cutie). Patrick Swayze, from the original Dirty Dancing, trying desperately to look younger …