Low-rise soufflé concocted of a family holiday on the Riviera. The action takes the form of a change-partners sexual cotillion in which the committed heterosexuals slightly outnumber the overt or borderline homosexuals, yet command much less attention from co-writers and co-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, the team responsible for …
Multicharacter tapestry of the seething melting pot of L.A., an object lesson on racial and ethnic stereotypes, attitudes, biases, tensions. The didactic impulse overrules good sense: a bigoted cop, for just one example, gives a hard time to a respectable black couple at the side of the road, and then …
Ecuadoran-born filmmaker Sebastián Cordero concocts an inflammatory fiction on inflammatory journalism, an unscrupulous exploration of professional ethics, a cynical exploitation of cynical exploitation. In it, a scripture-spouting Bible peddler (Damián Alcázar) accidentally kills a child who runs out in front of his car, the twin brother of a boy raped …
Or cry uncle. A clique of prep-school brats, in raw, grainy, glary photography, perpetrate a serial-killer hoax that seems to be coming true. A mindless mind game designed to ensnarl, even ensnarling the designers. With Julian Morris, Lindy Booth, Jared Padalecki, and Jon Bon Jovi; directed by Jeff Wadlow.
Werewolf update: Internet research, teen lingo ("This is pretty freaky shit"), computer-generated beasts, and self-mocking, or self-loathing, gags. The werewolf flipping the bird, with no one standing between itself and the camera, might well be doing it to the audience. With Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, and Judy Greer; …
Perhaps there is something to be said for passionate amateurs. Writer-director-producer-composer John Rad's labor of love about a woman who starts hunting dangerous men comes to a few more big screens than it did during its original 2005 release.
Yet another American remake of a Japanese horror film, but not, please, "just another." This atmospheric ghost story is more coherent, more cohesive, more cogent, than any Ring, any Grudge, any at all. It has a palpable theme, motherhood, and an evocative visual motif, water, and these have been worked …
A low-tech, low-budget, low-profile Charlie's Angels, with an uncloseted lesbian agenda. The top student at an all-girl spy school is writing her thesis on the elusive criminal mastermind, Lucy Diamond, when she gets to meet her subject face to face: "You're so not what I expected." The feeling is reciprocated: …
Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
A Chicago family man with a diabetic daughter strikes up a risky flirtation with a woman on the commuter train, ultimately takes her to an out-of-the-way fleabag, but before any passion can be consummated they are beset by a sneering robber, beaten and raped respectively, and subsequently blackmailed. Nasty, twisty, …
Filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig chronicles the life of a manic-depressive musician and artist named Daniel Johnston, using a blend of home movies, Johnston's own audiotapes, vintage performances, and current footage.
The sophomore effort of rocker-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie is a direct followup to his House of 1000 Corpses. (To have said "sophomoric effort" would have veered from fact into flattery.) The further adventures of a yokel family of mass murderers, whose aliases are lifted from Groucho Marx characters, carom between a …
A discarded wife, after eighteen years of marriage, gets revenge and a new romance, with a made-to-order dreamboat ("I carry you in my spirit") who's almost the living embodiment of a Luther Vandross song. Everyone else, too, gets better than they deserve. A clumsy and bruising piece of audience manipulation, …
Paris in the near future. Berlin-style walls have been put up around the ghettos to contain the spread of crime, and a WMD has fallen into the hands of a ganglord. The Hong Kong-style action and MTV-style camerawork fail to communicate the seriousness of the situation. With Cyril Raffaelli and …
Paul Schrader's telling of the backstory to The Exorcist -- the Nazis, the loss of faith, the postwar archaeological dig in Africa, the first exorcism, the renewed vocation -- had been deemed unreleasable in its finished form, and been replaced by Renny Harlin's retooling of it from scratch, with the …