Reunion of the writing and directing team of Paris, Texas, Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders, for a similarly slow-moving road movie, which seems to be set in an alternative universe where there still exists in the present day, much as it existed half a century earlier, a class of people …
Edward Norton enacts a soft-spoken, slick-shootin', sore-thumb cowboy in the San Fernando Valley (nowhere sorer than in synagogue), who enters an inadvisable relationship with a too-young girl, the succulently photographed Evan Rachel Wood. His self-styled Westerner persona ("You can be anybody you want to be. You just have to decide …
Broadway backstage musical -- not, that is to say, backstage on Broadway but backstage in Motown -- charting the breakthrough of R&B; into the pop mainstream in the Sixties, more specifically the rise of a girl group called the Dreams (rhymes with Supremes), and attendant heartbreaks, breakups, downfalls, and assorted …
A summer job with an over-the-hill actress (Julie Walters) emboldens a timid minister's son (Rupert Grint, the Ronald Weasley of the Harry Potter series) to throw off the yoke of his smothering mother (Laura Linney). Coming-of-age confection, sweet enough to cause tummy ache. Written and directed by Jeremy Brock.
Agreeably old-fashioned survival adventure, "inspired by a true story" as well as by a Japanese film inspired by the same story, about a team of Antarctic sled dogs who, after saving the life of a UCLA scientist in quest of "the first meteorite from the planet Mercury," are chained up …
A teenage boy, a telepathically talking dragon, a captive princess, an evil king, a sorcerer, an oppressed populace, a rebel band, and a first-time director schooled in CGI (Stefen Fangmeier, who surely ought to have cut his teeth on a vampire film). Altogether, a snigger when not a snore. With …
A respectable addition to Bukowskiana, if respectability can be a criterion for the life and work of the pickled writer, Charles Bukowski. A mangily bearded Matt Dillon, in the part of the author's semi-autobiographical stand-in, Henry Chinaski, gives a full-bodied performance, and a literally full-body one, his head tilted backwards …
This romantic-comic bauble by Tom Dey has a definite situation, namely a mid-thirties stud still living at home with his parents. If the situation were born of any necessity -- financial, psychological, medical, or otherwise -- the film might additionally have had a subject. But since the situation is only …
The second film by the one-name Tarsem (unused surname, Singh) differs by two letters from his first film, The Cell. It differs by little in other ways as well, a gagging phantasmagoria of debased and diluted surrealism. (Suggested title for his next opus: The Pill.) The story, a fiction-within-fiction wherein …
The second film by the one-name Tarsem (unused surname, Singh) differs by two letters from his first film, The Cell. It differs by little in other ways as well, a gagging phantasmagoria of debased and diluted surrealism. (Suggested title for his next opus: The Pill.) The story, a fiction-within-fiction wherein …
Multicharacter fictionalization of Eric Schlosser's nonfiction exposé of the same name. With it, director Richard Linklater picks up a placard and joins the radical parade of American fictioneers from Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair and Jack London and John Steinbeck and on down. The major issues, too many to fit …
Commonplace instance of a sequel that's really just an alternative version, a completely different cast of characters in a parallel series of contrived chain-reaction accidents with gory payoffs, all to test the dictum that you can't cheat death. Death, evidently, will go to great serpentine lengths to see that you …
Forty-nine years after Sidney Lumet's first courthouse drama, as well as first film of any type, Twelve Angry Men (which, inasmuch as it takes place in the jury room, can't quite be called a courtroom drama), the now eighty-one-year-old director returns to the genre. He had gone back to it …
Ridiculous heist-and-hostage thriller that requires the retirement-age Harrison Ford to shoulder altogether too much of the burden of heroics -- all of it, to be exact -- as much as Jean-Claude Van Damme shouldered at half the age. And this in the role of a family-man Seattle banker! Not an …
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) also co-writes this story of premarital disillusionment. Any time you get to see a radiant bride-to-be (Taraneh Alidoosti) try on her dress and admire her reflection at the outset, you know that bliss is in the crosshairs. (It’s an even bigger tip-off than the …