Machiavellian machinations in ancient China. Long, slow, and overacted -- excepting the always exceptional Gong Li. There are some handsome images, and some spectacular ones -- especially in the big action scenes -- but there are also overflows of buttery light and milky light, and the scenes of dialogue tend …
Omen-esque thriller in which Lucifer has precisely one appointed hour, from eleven to midnight at the close of the millennium, to mate with his preordained human bride and thus pave the way to his thousand-year reign on Earth. Whatever chances the movie might have had to be decent -- given, …
A sophisticated mix of illicit romance and unconventional religion, from the Graham Greene novel, set in Second World War-time England. Writer-director Neil Jordan, working from sturdier source material than in, say, Interview with the Vampire or The Butcher Boy, gets little of the credit for the clever narrative structure, only …
Not so treacly sports film from Disney, on the life of the Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie (who plays himself in adulthood). A docudrama with better documentary values than dramatic: prettily photographed and mundanely observant, but thin in incident, spare in dialogue, stiff in performance. The opening (and reprised) musical …
High-tech low-credibility caper thriller: a gentleman art thief ("Most people buy art just to show it off. I collect art for me") and a Mata Hari insurance agent assail the International Clearance Bank in Kuala Lumpur. Sean Connery, so obviously old for these hijinks that it must be addressed in …
David Cronenberg reverts to the science-fiction genre after a lengthy time away from it, although one hesitates to employ the standard opposition to genre fiction -- "straight" fiction -- to categorize such extravaganzas (or perhaps that should be eXtravaganZas) as Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, and Crash. In his …
Stanley Kubrick's posthumous opus, twelve years after his previous one, with an off-puttingly grainy, gritty, speckly image. It is not hard to believe he had wanted to make it for a long, long time. There's a moldy Sexual Revolution air about it that dates it by a good two or …
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan travels to Ireland and England, to follow a young Irish lass whose young lad has disgracefully enlisted in the British army as well as disgracefully gotten her pregnant. The lad's mother will not divulge his new address, and the lass's father is no help either ("You're …
Director David Fincher, loaded with don't-try-this-at-home ideas on how to prove yourself a man and not a mouse, traces a course of anti-Establishment insurgency, from small acts of personal liberation (peeing in the lobster bisque, splicing a frame of male genitals into the middle of a kiddie film) to organizing …
Imagine, if you will, a movie about the brothels of Shanghai in the late 19th Century. (Take a moment. Think about it.) Whatever you might imagine, whatever you might expect, whatever you might hope for, it would almost certainly bear no resemblance whatsoever to the vision of Hou Hsiao-hsien. For …
Grind-it-out road comedy about a slightly uptight hunk (Ben Affleck, as loose-limbed as usual) who sows his first and last wild oats between New York City and Savannah, under the guidance of a free-spirited cutenik (Sandra Bullock, the Kerouac of cuteniks), while on his way to his own wedding. The …
An evenly balanced guy movie and girl movie, and no mushier on one side of the scales than on the other. The attempt to accommodate two movies in one might account for the bloatedness of the project, though in fact the narrative structure seems designed for economy. Kevin Costner, whose …
Amiable spoof of the Star Trek phenomenon (pre-reunion on the big screen), with names changed to protect the guilty. The most scrumptiously swallowable material has to do with the jostling egos of these former TV co-stars, chained to each other and to their old roles as they hobble around the …
Lurid whodunit, adapted from a Nelson DeMille potboiler, about a pulchritudinous Army psychologist who is found on the grounds of fictitious Fort McCallam, Ga., stripped bare, spread-eagled, lashed to four tent stakes, and apparently strangled. She happens also, if the foregoing is not inflammatory enough, to be the daughter of …
Writer-director Jim Jarmusch caters to the craving for originality at all costs. The hero is a black hit man (Forest Whitaker) who religiously reads Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (sometimes he reads passages of it to us right out loud: "Every day without fail one should consider himself as …