A mere sidelight in the Ben-and-Jen media blitz. It documents the moment in history when America's Sexiest Man got together with Super Buns, and the way the media carried on beforehand, you'd have thought the moment was bigger than when Dick met Liz. (Document: Cleopatra.) The critical backlash, perhaps a …
Envisioning a chain of events that might have led to the Vermeer painting of the same name: the coming to the Master's household of a chaste young maid, daughter of a blinded Delft tile painter, and her inch-by-inch entrée to the artist's atelier by virtue of her demonstrated interest in …
Three-and-three-quarter-hour Civil War epic from Ronald F. Maxwell, writer and director also of Gettysburg: eight hours all told. Although it was made ten years later, and although the action takes place earlier, many of the same actors have been retained in the same roles (e.g., Jeff Daniels, C. Thomas Howell, …
Mothra's twin fairies appear with a warning to Japan that Kiryu (aka Mechagodzilla) must be put to rest at the bottom of the ocean or face the wrath of Mothra. When Godzilla returns once again, will humanity heed the warning or will Kiryu be forced to fight against two monsters? …
In 1990, to protect his fragile mother from a fatal shock after a long coma, a young man must keep her from learning that her beloved nation of East Germany as she knew it has disappeared. Directed by Wolfgang Becker, starring Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß, and Chulpan Khamatova.
Loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur, loose as ashes (to steal a line from Bing Crosby). The hero looks to be the brainchild of an intellectually precocious adolescent, one who has immersed himself in Raymond Chandler -- although these days it might be Robert Parker or Lawrence Block …
Odd odyssey of a young Yakuza who has lost his loose-cannon brother. The gynecological impossibility of the climax is pretty freaky, but after the masturbating restaurateur, the lactating hotelier, the masochistic spiritualist, the man with the two-toned face, the soup-ladle sex toy, etc., it seems almost normal. Hideki Sone, Sho …
Dance instructor from India (a specialist in the macarena) chases the American Dream in New York, where he falls by accident into the role of high-society swami, under the philosophical tutelage of an unsullied porn actress. A roundabout path to a trite and tacky romantic comedy, completely indifferent to the …
A nothing, or close enough to make no difference, about a groom-to-be who wakes up after his bachelor party with a Tiki Girl in his bed. The Tiki Girl turns out to be the bride-to-be's cousin. An attack of the crabs, a simulated bout of diarrhea, a pair of "dirty" …
Amoral Australian crime drama, with a number of odd touches (e.g., the dyslexic hit man who sees letters and numerals in reverse: "YLNO FFATS"), perhaps a few oddities too many. Though her "greedy little tart" is a fickle, hard-to-figure character, Rachel Griffiths is powerfully present in all her scenes. Apart …
Mere months after Pirates of the Caribbean, the Disney studio guides us across New Orleans Square (seceded from Frontierland) for another Disneyland ride-turned-movie: a slender thread of storyline -- "We have to break the curse!" -- on which to hang the special-effects baubles. (When do we make our way to …
Chris Rock herewith puts himself in the category, if not the league, of Chaplin, Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen: the comic-hyphen-director, if not the comic-hyphen-auteur. A Capra-esque Little Man comedy, a Rocky of the political arena, it casts Rock as a piddling D.C. alderman who, on the strength of a …
Severely strained kiddie film adapted from a much-decorated novel by Louis Sachar. Three plotlines -- the origins of a hundred-fifty-year-old family curse in Latvia; interracial love, bigotry, and revenge in the Wild West; a juvenile hard-labor camp in present-day Texas -- keep interrupting one another and impeding momentum. The third …