Disney-esque formula sports film, directed by Charles Stone III, about a hot-shot freshman on a full scholarship to Atlanta A&T, who needs to learn the meaning of teamwork. Except that the "sport" isn't football, isn't basketball, isn't even a sport; it's the marching band (motto: "One band, one sound"), pointing …
Wised-up, camped-up creature feature about overgrown arachnids overrunning Prosperity, Arizona. Incestuous horror-film allusions abound: a parrot who squawks, "I see dead people!"; a clip from Them! in a TV Monster Movie Marathon; a shopping-mall fortress similar to the one in Dawn of the Dead; and on and on. Although it …
Pedantic induction into the hallowed halls of St. Benedict's School for Boys: the dedicated teacher, the troublemaking pupil, the lessons learned, the damp-eyed twenty-five-year reunion. The bulk of the action is set in the Seventies, but it often feels as if it's seventy years earlier. With Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, …
Alternative history lesson revealing how Napoleon escaped St. Helena, leaving behind a dead ringer to fool his British jailers, and how he returned to France but not all the way to the throne as planned. A well-mounted production, handled with care by television director Alan Taylor (The Sopranos, Sex and …
Second World War espionage thriller, set on the British homefront at Bletchley Park, otherwise known as Station X, the top-secret cryptography center, where they've now got just four days to crack "Shark," the revised German U-boat code, before a convoy of merchant ships from the U.S. enters perilous waters. In …
The Spanish paterfamilias in the oncology wing of a Parisian hospital seems to be suffering from paranoid fantasies in addition to terminal cancer. Or is there some truth in them? There's a mystery here, but it has little pull -- just enough. Well played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, Fernando Fernán Gómez, …
Too much. An empowerment potboiler lifted above a USA Network original only by the star power of Jennifer Lopez, it chronicles the heroine's time-lapse evolution from greasy-spoon waitress to satin-sheets bride to blank-check homemaker to cheated-on, battered, and verbally abused spouse. First major warning sign: her husband declines her request …
Fact-based sob story, set in the Fifties, about a hard-drinking, unemployed Irishman (Pierce Brosnan, whose brogue seems to raise his voice half an octave) whose children are taken away from him after his wife runs off with another man, and who must storm the fortress of Family Law in order …
A team of "extreme" athletes, on location in the Alps to shoot a commercial, cross paths with a band of fugitive terrorists: just something else to get the adrenalin pumping and the rock music pounding. Extreme stupidity. With Rufus Sewell, Rupert Graves, Devon Sawa, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras; directed by Christian Duguay.
At the outset, Todd Haynes carries us on a crane over a Peyton Place-y town square (or square town) and into the glossy world of the 1950s "women's picture." It is mildly amazing how straight he plays it, or anyway how deadpan, although there are nonetheless as many laughs as …
Any wag who wished to say that this is the best Inuit-language film to have ever come down the pike, might have said equally well, if not as waggishly, that it's the worst. More objectively: the only. The "language" qualifier allows it to dodge head-to-head competition with such superior Eskimo …
Brian De Palma, as ever, exhibits abundant mechanical skills and equally abundant delight in their application. It would be fruitless to wonder what kind of career he could have had if he possessed even half a brain. Here he constructs, from a script of his own, a self-conscious film noir …
A hopeful young pianist on "the C-track" -- conservatories, competitions, concerts -- gets sidetracked when he sits in on stage as a page-turner for his idol, who soon initiates him into the gay lifestyle. The Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons seems a little hamstrung in the English language, but the directness …