An escapee of a Polish concentration camp hides out with a childless couple in his old Czech neighborhood -- a serious comedy, quite spiritual at the end, but with an insubstantial, unstable image. For moments of special intensity, the movie employs an odd, skipping, skidding kind of motion, mildly hallucinogenic. …
Resurrection again! Writer-director Patrick Lussier, under the imprimatur of Wes Craven, has some genuine ideas to fiddle with. Dracula, pronounced "Dra-COOL-ya" by one who should know, does not register on camera any more than in a mirror. And his invisibility in mirrors, speaking of which, is used against him in …
A conventional, imitative, unimaginative, unadventurous dark comedy concerning the multiple suspects in the suspicious death of the most despised woman in Verplanck, N.Y. Dark comedies are not what they used to be. They are much nearer the middle of the road. (Once again the cliché of the canine casualty: run …
A major ouch. The kiddie-lit holiday homily — "Maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store./ Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more" — illustrated in theme-park sets and costumes (rodenty snouts on all the citizens of Whoville save the little heroine, Taylor Momsen, and Christine Baranski). Jim Carrey, as …
More specifically, a Dallas gynecologist (Richard Gere, with a tidier haircut and a sincerer persona) and his psychotic wife, his materialistic sister-in-law, his protective and adoring receptionist, his numerous demanding patients, a country-club golf pro who becomes his new lover, and his two grown daughters, one of whom is soon …
Juvenile game of Good vs. Evil (as Milton Bradley might put it: Ages 6 to 10), set in a Medieval fantasyland populated by mages and commoners, a sulky teenage empress, a giant red-bearded "dwarf," a full-grown pointy-eared "elf," a British-accented mock-Shakespearean bad guy (Jeremy Irons, destroying any last shred of …
Animated adventure about a self-absorbed South American monarch (David Spade, irritating even when only a voice) who is enlighteningly transformed into a llama. Made in the latter-day Disney style -- brassy, sassy, myopically "modern" -- and on the latter-day accelerated production schedule: thus the simplified graphics and limited cast of …
Doris Dorrie's didactic comedy about two German brothers on a trek to a Buddhist monastery outside Tokyo. Over and above the subject matter, however, it is yet another DV demo with a bland, washed-out, homogenized image that appears encased somehow in the skin of a bratwurst. (The lovely -- and …
Ostensibly this has to do with a factual water-contamination case not unlike that of A Civil Action. But more centrally and essentially, it has to do with Julia Roberts's hitherto unnoticed boobs, which are pushed up, pressed together, and popped out -- where did these come from? -- in an …
A good-things-happen-to-kidnappers comedy, with a trendy tie-in to the cult of celebrity. How's this for plotting? Begin with a blue-collar Belgian, a blindly (or perhaps clairvoyantly) proud papa who's convinced of the latent talent of his overweight bovine daughter, despite her consistent judges' scores of "2" and "3" for her …
The strange, twisted, incomprehensible bond between a female serial killer (who had traumatically lost her father) and a high-tech detective (who had traumatically lost his daughter). Gimmicky thriller -- souvenir snow globes to mark every change of scene, ghostly visitations from the vanished daughter, guardian-angel symbols, computer graphics galore -- …
And the married name of Bakker (later Messner): divorced wife of televangelist Jim Bakker, deposed queen of the PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry and the Heritage USA theme park ("a Christian Disneyland," in the words of the narrator, RuPaul Charles). Nonfiction filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato take up the …
A screenplay by Ingmar Bergman placed into the directorial, or custodial, hands of one of his former actresses and off-screen lovers, Liv Ullmann. (Not their first such collaboration: see Private Confessions, 1997.) The plain lettering and plain background of the opening credits, the absence of any music behind them, the …