The futile struggle against fate of an unnecessarily unsympathetic hero, a fast-talking flooring salesman who wants to transition to jukeboxes. Belabored, unbelievable, but sizzlingly photographed in the Southwest desert by Eric Edwards, and played with strong conviction by Guy Pearce, Piper Perabo, William Fichtner, Rick Gonzalez, Jackie Burroughs, and especially, …
Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien evokes Albert Lamorisse’s fey little half-hour fantasy of 1956, not merely in the last three words of the title, but in very intermittent and unintegrated appearances of an actual red balloon, the size and strength of a beach ball, every bit as autonomous as Lamorisse’s, albeit …
Make-a-difference true story about an idealistic young English teacher at an "integrated" high school in Long Beach, where she brings peace and harmony to her fractious classroom (she appears to teach only one hour per day) and seemingly also to the community at large: the gang violence peters out dramatically …
Yet another Marvel Comic turned unmarvelous movie, about an Evel Knievel motorcycle daredevil (Nicolas Cage, with a black divot of a hairpiece) who has sold his soul to Mephistopheles (a bouffant Peter Fonda), though he flees his responsibilities as "the Devil's bounty hunter" and continues to pursue his chosen vocation. …
To head off disappointment, it would be prudent to disclose that this effort by Claude Chabrol, “France’s Master of Suspense,” is really not a thriller. Though it by and by works its way around to a crime of passion, it is really more an affairs-of-the-heart type of thing. Many a …
Unstirring epic fantasy, set in a parallel universe where people's souls walk beside them in the form of talking animals, called "daemons." In addition, there's a whole glossary of made-up proper nouns, an obligatory oppressive, thought-policing Ruling Power, and a young girl singled out by destiny to be the Savior, …
Directing debut of Ben Affleck, who stays behind the camera and cedes the spotlight to his younger brother Casey, in the role of Patrick Kenzie, the Boston missing-persons private eye ("I find the people that started in the cracks and then fell through"), along with his "snooty" partner Angie Gennaro …
An Oprah film (or anagrammatically, a Harpo Film) for Oprah's audience, with their insatiable appetite for uplift. The fact-based story of the debate team at little Wiley College, an all-black institution in segregationist Texas, and of their climactic showdown on the topic of Civil Disobedience against the national champs of …
It sounded like a fun idea at first. Two movies in one, a prepackaged double feature, in emulation of, or tribute to, the Golden Age exploitation films of the Sixties and Seventies, the last of the B-pictures, the Joe Bob Briggs drive-in movies, the 42nd Street grindhouse fare. Planet Terror …
Soft on cannibalism. But after all, Hannibal Lecter has made a lot of money for Hollywood, a powerful argument for clemency. Mostly boring and senseless, the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs (and Hannibal and Red Dragon) busies itself with mitigating circumstances. Surely any reasonable man can understand why …
Pot V, if you're counting. War with the Dark Lord, as you might recall from the end of Pot IV, approaches; and after another two-and-a-quarter hours of stretching and padding, it still approaches. At the rate Daniel Radcliffe is aging, Harry looks on course to be the World's Oldest Grad …
The Farrelly brothers' remake, thirty-five years after the original, serves as a handy gauge of the decline of Western civilization. Apart from their substitution of bodily-function gags for social observation and verbal wit, the well-cast and well-constructed comedy about the man who strays on his honeymoon (as directed by Elaine …
Extensive re-write of the 1986 road-movie thriller of the same name, altering but not eliminating the truck-pull pièce de résistance, the tearing of limb from limb. What emerges from the overhaul is a no-fun Spring Break for a collegiate Cute Couple harassed by a homicidal highway menace (supernatural or just …