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 …
Edward James Olmos's pet project (he directs it as well as stars in it), a moralizing, make-a-difference gang movie that depicts the cyclic hopelessness of life in the L.A. barrios. Ambitious in scope, it begins on the night of the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, skips to 1959, skips again …
Comic documentary, not quite a "mockumentary," about a marginal Milwaukee filmmaker by the name of Mark Borchardt (whose upper Midwest accent is suspiciously thicker than any in his immediate family), spurred by the regional cinema of Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to do his …
What health care looks like on the ground. Documentary follows five nurses — young, old, male, female — in five places: prison, labor and delivery, home health care, nursing home, and the military.
Mathieu Demy's Americano (which he wrote, directed, and stars in) is a loving tribute to his parents, divine cinematic beings Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy. Don't worry, though; even if you can't screen Lola, The Model Shop, and Jacquot de Nantes in advance, Americano stands on its own as an …
Hagiographic portrait of Jesse James, minus the ultimate martyrdom to bum you out. For the parched Western fan, staggering for months and years across the wasteland of the genre, it amounts to a canteen of sand. The first gorge-rising moment comes early, when pretty-boy Colin Farrell (the blackest brows since …
Ewan McGregor's directorial debut (he also stars) takes on nothing less than the fragile impermanence of the American Dream — dreams, after all, being things up from which you must ultimately wake — even going so far as to imply that the seeds of its destruction are sown even as …
A trustworthy storyteller recognizes that the essence of fantasy relies less on a filmmaker’s potential to suspend disbelief and more on their ability to create a plausible universe within which to frame their work. Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen) is a Russian-Jewish immigrant, transplanted to Brooklyn in 1919, where he worked …
Horny-teenager update at the end of the millennium. Four buddies form a pact to lose their virginity by prom night: "No longer will our penises be flaccid and unused!" Moments of tastelessness intrude on stretches of mere insipidness. Chris Klein and Natasha Lyonne can do better for themselves, and already …
Rough and raw documentary by the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert: rough and raw in treatment as much as in subject. And highly educational, too, though it fails to provide a full answer to the innocent question of why pimps are necessary. The names of the garrulous participants are an …
Smooth, smug, half-smart. That description doesn't just fit Michael Douglas in the title role, but the movie as a whole, a retro romantic comedy that engineers a meet-cute (and a continuing date-cute) between the Democratic widower in the Oval Office and a married-to-career hatchet woman for an environmental lobby. ("I …
Knocking-kneed adaptation of the "controversial" novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Director and co-scriptwriter Mary Harron, keeping the story in the Reagan era (mobile phones as big as shoes), or in other words keeping it daintily at arm's length, wants to be double-sure that you know it's a satire -- as …
A flippant but turgid sequel. The American Pie gang comes to a reunion, the “men” still quite juvenile, the women a touch jaded. The body-function gags lack a ruling brain, and a Brothers Karamazov joke seems to be from another planet. This is stamped plastic for people who find Jason …
Heartfelt and personal but maudlin and awkward account of the maladjustment of a six-year-old Hungarian émigré in Eisenhower-era America. It gets off on a bad foot with some remedial first-person narration, corroborative newsreel footage, and a black-and-white flashback that arbitrarily turns to color after a quarter of an hour. It …