Formula underworld drama poured into an epic template. Like Jiffy-brand waffle batter spread over an iron the size of a billiard table. "Based on a true story," it traces, in separate intertwined storylines, the converging upward paths of criminal and cop: the former (Denzel Washington) starting out as the servile …
Paul Schrader's Bressonian portrait of a high-priced Beverly Hills gigolo: adolescently admiring and envying, but never very informative or inventive. Less than halfway through the thing, the gigolo's professional life gives way to the more automatically plottable business of a murder frameup, with the gigolo's every step shadowed by unknown …
The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
Old-fashioned spook story, as well it ought to be, set as it is in the Eighteen Teens, and based on a documented case in Tennessee. Fumbling direction (by Courtney Solomon), crude shocks, and dull color shatter any illusion. With Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, Rachel Hurd-Wood, and James D'Arcy.
Mawkish and sledgehammering cycle-of-violence lesson around a high-school skinhead (Edward Furlong) and the older brother (Edward Norton) who has been his idol and mentor and who now comes out of prison a changed man. In flashback, Norton is afforded a broad platform and a lot of rope, and he spins …
Documentary using archival footage to explore the evolution of pachuco and cholo culture.
…needs lots of American worker bees to make it, a roving swarm that labors for the sake of preserving the hive and comforting the queen, and thinks of nothing else. (If that analogy seems a bit much, just take note of the preponderance of bugs through this captivating film’s generous …
An accordion-like compression of early rock-and-roll history, sociology, and mythology. This Memory Lane movie pushes a goodly number of nostalgia buttons, and it hopes that the subject matter and the fond feeling for that subject matter are alone sufficient to carry an audience along. It hopes, also, to camouflage the …
A heaping helping of period pleasure from director David O. Russell. Irving Rosenfeld (a gutty Christian Bale, resplendent in combover and ascot) is a '70s Jay Gatsby without the class anxiety, a man comfortable with the notion that everybody is, like him, working the con — getting along by lying …
The title encapsulates a recipe for pretension, culminating in an endless eighteen-minute "ballet." (A Gershwin musical score could not be expected to impose some restraint.) Vincente Minnelli would further overreach himself, in the same general direction, in Lust for Life. With Gene Kelly (dazzling dancing and choreography), Leslie Caron (her …
Tom Cruise breaks out his best shit-eating grin (and accompanying bad-boyisms, mooning included) to play Great American Barry Seal for director Doug Liman. Good thing, too, since he winds up eating an awful lot of it: a lil’ cigar-smuggling while working as a commercial pilot leads to the CIA hooking …
A broke, disenchanted med student (Katharine Isabelle) answers an ad for a strip club, winds up freelancing as a surgeon for the mob, and quickly becomes a marketable handicrafter skilled in the art of body modification. The Canadian writing, directing team of twisted twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, aided by …