A tall tale about a tall tale, the bogus "authorized autobiography" of Howard Hughes, peddled by Clifford Irving to McGraw-Hill in the early Seventies. Richard Gere, as the hungering writer ("The middle of my life is at hand. I don't have a couch"), has some funny bits imitating Hughes's speech …
A ninety-minute Buddhist retreat under the spiritual guidance of chef Edward Espe Brown, author of "the Bible of bread making." Or in other words: the dharma made palatable, even delectable. The focal point of German filmmaker Doris Dörrie (Enlightenment Guaranteed) ripples outward from personal matters like anger and confusion to …
The third screen treatment of Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic vampire tale is the first to retain the original title (cf. The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man), and the first to bring to it the total commitment of top dollar, most helpful in creating a weed-overgrown New York City. …
Todd Haynes blows another cloud of mist into the mystique of Bob Dylan. The filmmaker, who once enlisted Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story, now borrows a gimmick used by Todd Solondz in Palindromes, employing a rotation of dissimilar actors to play a single role, a multiplication of …
Jonathan Kasdan becomes the second son of Lawrence Kasdan, after Jake, to have followed his father into the director's chair. His feature debut is a relationship thing at about the Cameron Crowe level of wit and wisdom, although perhaps that name offers itself as a reference point because of the …
Slick assembly of archive footage and interviews with retired astronauts (Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Mike Collins, Jim Lovell, Edgar Mitchell, Harrison Schmitt, Dave Scott, and John Young), to tell the story of the Apollo moon shots. It's a big story -- history merged with science fiction -- and …
A more commendable writing and directing effort from Paul Haggis (writer only on Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers, among others) than his hokey Oscar-winner, Crash. More focussed, more concentrated, more self-contained, more consistent: an uncompromisingly mournful murder mystery, and strangled antiwar cry, about a veteran of Operation …
Illustration, in a sketchy hand, of the Jon Krakauer nonfiction book on Christopher McCandless, a 1990 college graduate, on the doorstep of Harvard Law School, who gave away his tuition fund to Oxfam, obliterated his identity, renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, and swapped the evils of society for the purity of …
Fourth time around on screen for Jack Finney's serviceable Body Snatcher novel, refashioned for the CGI era, the CNN era, the post-9/11 era, the "postmodern feminist" era, the text-message and laptop era. It still functions. An alien-invasion scenario is perhaps not the most obvious choice for the English-language debut of …
Nebbish and dingbat, engaged at first sight, married at first chance. By name, Chris Messina and Jennifer Westfeldt, a poor man’s Steve Guttenberg and poor woman’s Jennifer Tilly (except that she’s also the scriptwriter). With Judith Light, Robert Klein, Frances Conroy, Fred Willard, and Jason Alexander; directed by Robert Cary.
Jiri Menzel, missing in action since the Czech New Wave of the Sixties (Closely Watched Trains, Capricious Summer), has actually ground out over a dozen films in the interim, before this one got tabbed for U.S. distribution: a literally Little Man comedy, consistent with the pitying humanism we remember, about …
Into a complacent marriage comes temptation, the wet-lipped Kerry Washington, a Platonic old friend with vertiginous décolletage. Chris Rock is the star, albeit no actor, and he's also the director and co-writer, nominally inspired by the last of Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," Chloe in the Afternoon, 1972. (The "Fin" …
The first film of French novelist Philippe Claudel, about a genteel parolee who moves in temporarily with her younger sister and in-laws, is leisurely, patient, closely observed, committedly acted (Kristin Scott Thomas, with dark circles around her eyes, and Elsa Zylberstein), drably photographed, and passably absorbing, at least until it …