John Waters at low ebb. Spring is sprung, the sap is flowing, the birds twitter and the bees buzz, and the battle lines are drawn, straight through Middle America, between the sex maniacs and the neuters. ("Let's go sexin'!" vs. "I'm Viagra-vated and I'm not going to take it anymore!") …
Tasteless, touchless, but strongly smelling sports comedy, wherein Average Joe's little mom-and-pop gymnasium and its corporate neighbor Globo Gym ("We're better than you and we know it") are on a collision course for the $50,000 prize money in a Vegas dodgeball tournament. The motto of the underdog is the motto …
Danish director Lars von Trier follows up Dancer in the Dark with another unrecognizable portrait of America. A pedantic or facetious moral tale, it takes place in Depression-period costume on a sparse and stylized stage set, which from overhead looks like a near life-sized blueprint of a tiny town in …
While waiting for his fifteen-year-old daughter to emerge from touch-and-go surgery for a head trauma, a doctor examines in flashback his double life as the upstanding husband of a cool blond beauty and as the rough lover, in fact rapist in the first place, of an earthy dark peasant. It's …
Tod Williams's adaptation of only a fraction of the John Irving novel, A Widow for One Year. That fractionalization may account for the slight feeling of aimlessness and lack of focus. The basic situation is tidy enough: an aspiring author in his junior year at Exeter comes for the summer …
Nothing-is-as-it-seems love triangle, composed of a Brit, a Brazilian, and a Spaniard, in London. Writer-director Matthew Parkhill, in his feature debut, conceals the complete illogicality until the "sucker-punch" twist. In the meantime, he reveals the charms of Gael García Bernal and Natalia Verbeke. With James D'Arcy, Tom Hardy, Charlie Cox.
Two-and-a-half-hour countdown to the end of the Third Reich. Bruno Ganz, digging into his meatiest role in years, looks and sounds fine as the Führer and filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel's strict adherence to documented history, and to the precise design and décor of the infamous bunker, give the film some educational …
A fairy-tale kingdom -- elves, ogres, giants, fairy godmothers -- sprinkled with modern anachronisms in the manner of a latter-day Disney cartoon. Anne Hathaway is game enough as a Cinderella blessed, or cursed, at birth by the "gift" of obedience, requiring her to acquiesce to any statement in the imperative …
The opening sequence, of what a newspaper headline will describe as a "Freak Balloon Accident," disrupting an idyllic picnic in the English countryside, is a true grabber. The protagonist, who loses his grip both literally and then figuratively, will be tortured over his role in the mishap, despite the reassurances …
Sizes up the strain on a friendship after the "dreamer" of the two invents an aerosol spray to make dogshit disappear. The invention itself -- Vapoorize -- gives a fair indication of the level of inventiveness in the movie (license plates: "CACA KING" and "POO CZAR"), and further proof that …
Three-part anthology film, with individual pieces by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh, and the nonagenarian Michelangelo Antonioni: "The Hand," "Equilibrium," and "The Dangerous Thread of Things," in order. Only one of the pieces is a keeper. The first one. The one that provides a full and satisfying moviegoing experience and leaves …
Charlie Kaufman, scriptwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, drills a new tunnel into his favorite fictional locale, the human brain, this time by way of the science-fictional device of an illicit memory-erasure service called Lacuna, Inc. ("Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage, but …
Drab little indie about an impoverished teenage girl who sets her cap for the overprivileged rich kid. Writer-director Enid Zentelis extends her empathy all the way through to an impoverished imagination. Distributed to theaters on DVD rather than in cans of film, to ensure that it would look worse on …
Backstory on how Father Merrin -- the old priest under the streetlamp -- lost his faith in a Nazi concentration camp and regained it in a confrontation with a devil's agent at an archaeological dig in Kenya. An hour-and-three-quarter afterthought, it has all the standard disadvantages of prequels: it fails …