A men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus romantic comedy, a substantial subject and amply amusing. It tells you a lot about the film, though, that the gist of it may be summed up in the title of a pop-psych best seller. Our Martian man, a middle-school math teacher, is also (note the year: 2003) a …
Directed by Tetsuya Nomura, Takeshi Nozue. Starring Takahiro Sakurai, Ayumi Itô and Shôtarô Morikubo.
Airborne thriller gets off the ground in good shape, and while aloft adds another variation to the infinitude of locked-room mysteries. After taking her six-year-old daughter to stretch out in the empty back rows of a double-decker jumbo jet, the mother nods off and wakes up, midflight, to find her …
Inert, indolent domestic drama around a Memphis music producer, his much younger Russian mate, and his married son visiting from California. Groping, improvisatory-sounding dialogue; a drizzly, dismal image; a yawner. With Rip Torn, Dina Korzun, and Darren Burrows; directed by Ira Sachs.
The titular quartet, all adopted, all acknowledged "fuck-ups," are of two races, evenly divided, black and white, and reunited for the Turkey Day funeral of their sainted mother, murdered in the course of a liquor-store holdup. "I didn't come back here for the funeral," explains the Mark Wahlberg one, making …
Fast and loose remake by Dean Parisot of the all but forgotten 1977 social satire by Ted Kotcheff, the American Nightmare reimagined specially for the epoch of Adelphia, Enron, and other corporate miscreants. Fast pacing, that is, and loose plotting. Jim Carrey, as the out-of-work executive who stops his financial …
The slight transformation of a mere gangsta into a gangsta rapper. Notwithstanding the biographical parallels to the life of its star, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (the internecine drug wars, the prison stint, the nine bullet wounds, etc.), it is lethally banal. "50 Cent," a two-bit actor, supplies an unarticulated, uninflected, …
Unabashed hero worship of the "crusading" CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, directed and co-written by George Clooney, who also plays Murrow's television producer, Fred Friendly. (In the lead role, David Strathairn has Murrow's somber countenance, speaks with his cadence, and goes through a full carton of his coffin nails.) Framed …
Class struggle on the links, along with an England-vs.-America thing and a professional-vs.-amateur thing. The game in question is not golf in general, but specifically the eighteen-hole playoff of the 1913 U.S. Open. Shia LaBeouf has a nice quiet self-assurance as the former caddy, Francis Ouimet, who goes up against …
True story of a U.S. Ranger assault on a POW camp in the Philippines toward the end of the Second World War, though the first-person narrator, the leader of the assault, starts back a bit further: "In 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor...." John Dahl, the director, had had trouble …
The globe-trotting Werner Herzog digs up another of those border dwellers, those boundary pushers, he loves to document -- one Timothy Treadwell, b. 1957, d. 2003 -- along with a hundred or so hours of found footage, a treasure trove of video shot by the subject himself, mostly of himself, …
That's the name the occupying army has bestowed on the "weekend party palace" of Saddam's son, Uday, complete with swimming pool, fishing pond, putting green, and bomb damage. Documentarian Michael Tucker, narrating the action in the ominous amplified murmur of Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, lived there for two months …
Three interwoven plotlines with occasional points of intersection, one of them to do with the tested friendship between homosexual couples of opposite sexes, one to do with the boat-rocking new female lead singer of a garage band, and one to do with a wannabe documentary filmmaker who focuses his camcorder …