Business mixed with pleasure: a breakneck project to paint several miles' worth of power-line pylons across the bleak Yorkshire landscape, and a romance between the foreman of the crew and a peregrinating, rock-climbing Aussie lass who hires on for pocket money. The camaraderie and conflict among the laborers (a strained …
Upper-middle-class Jewish kids on Long Island descend into an unelucidated underworld, in pursuit of lives of crime. Low-low-budget sub-sub-Scorsese: "Hey, fuck fuckin' Hollywood, awright?" Written and directed by Rob Weiss, with a cast of unknowns.
The first collaboration between dancer Antonio Gades and director Carlos Saura, Blood Wedding, was a stark dress rehearsal in a dance studio; the second, Carmen, was a realistic backstage musical, or anyway as realistic as its life-imitating-art gambits would permit. This third one is something altogether different again, a fully …
While Carlos and Lucia are in Spain trying to convince Carlos' friend to attend their wedding, Lucia literally crashes into Leon. Lucia and Leon fall for each other, which means trouble for Ana, Leon's fiance. The jinx, they are hi.
The Traffic route to "complexity": three interlocked storylines under one umbrella. All of them, set alike in Mexico City, have to do with one kind or another of love, and all of them involve dogs and varying degrees of cruelty thereto. The one point of intersection shared by all three …
A movie about Cardenche singing, which was born within the backdrop akin to slavery of the cotton laborers of Durango in the 19th century. A tradition hanging on by a thread.
Drearily prolonged situation involving a distinguished black scholar (and "thorn in the side of the white man") who is mistaken for a thief in his posh new summer home. Drearily photographed, too. Nicolas Cage's goofy self-amusement and Samuel Jackson's smoldering intensity are wasted. With Michael Lerner, Margaret Colin, Dabney Coleman, …
So far, Michael Haneke has specialized in focusing his clinician’s eye on tests of morality that arise during life’s deeply unsettling transgressive moments. A film about losing one’s spouse to Alzheimer's seemed to be a logical progression. Selecting French acting legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva to star as the …
This film plays as part of the San Diego Latino Film Festival. According to the festival brochure, "During the late 1980’s, on the Venezuelan / Colombian border, two men survive an armed assault in the bed of the Arauca River. The men claim they were attacked by the Venezuelan military, …
Divorced Palestinian single mother (Nisreen Faour, a good actress in bad photography) moves to Illinois for a better life at the worst time — the thick of Operation Iraqi Freedom — and settles for a demeaning job at White Castle ("Support our oops" on the signboard outside), meets a sympathetic …
Director David O. Russell returns from an extended absence (after the oddflop Joy) with an extended...well, it’s hard to say what, exactly. A spoof on the hard-boiled works of Humphrey Bogart? That would explain the Maltese Falcon voiceover, the Big Sleep meetup with the rich family trying to control its …