Directed by one-half of the co-directing team of The Big Night, Stanley Tucci, but not half as good a movie. The other half of that team, Campbell Scott, has an expanded role on screen as the monocled and facially scarred Teutonic martinet who runs a tight ship on a transatlantic …
Director Zalman King (Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid, and the like) shifts his gaze from the form of the female figure to the form of the surf. His "vision" is mystical, mythical, grandiose, although lacking the epic style of Milius's Big Wednesday, substituting the doodling style of a Baywatch montage. …
Authentic and very unpleasant shocker from French filmmaker Gaspar Noé. A sort of Angry Middle-Aged Man tale, a Taxi Driver without star power, a rough cinematic equivalent of Céline, it pulls us into the life and mind of an unemployed butcher whom we cannot help but find repugnant. The seal …
But who still cares? Repetitive sequel tells of a couple of college girls who think the capital of Brazil is Rio, and who land in the middle of a killing field as a result. With Jennifer Love Hewitt, Brandy, Mekhi Phifer, Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Matthew Settle; directed by Danny …
Homage to the Jacques Demy of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Young Girls of Rochefort, and A Room in Town, the connoisseur and custodian of the Golden Age musical. Co-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have taken from Demy the idea of a musical as a casual kind of thing, a form …
Cheesy action-comedy with Jean-Claude van Damme as a disreputable Hong Kong businessman, and (as it happens) indefatigable fighting machine, in a crossfire between the Russian Mafia and the CIA. The gimmicky direction of Tsui Hark keeps setting off firecrackers to disrupt your nap. With Rob Schneider, Lela Rochon, Paul Sorvino.
An academic hoax -- faked footage of a "lost" New Guinea tribe in the Anthropology professor's backyard -- and a happy ending for the hoaxers. (Useful documentary evidence of moral decay in America.) A few old pros and one new -- Richard Dreyfuss, Lily Tomlin, Elaine Stritch, and Jenna Elfman …
Brazenly sleazeball documentary, poking into the "various conspiracy theories" around the apparent suicide in 1994 of grunge-rocker Kurt Cobain. It is a reeling, lurching mess of a movie, assembled in slapdash fashion from archive footage, interviews, and travelling shots en route to interviews, all plastered together with the phlegmatic first-person …
Home-fires soap opera, set in WWII England, underlit and overacted. A potentially interesting historical phenomenon -- the army of female volunteers who pitched in on the farms -- is narrowed down ludicrously to a trio of nubile brunette beauties (Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel), each of whom has a …
Holocaust horror stories, principally those of five Hungarians, now Americans, who survived the accelerated genocide of the final year of the war. A pedestrian documentary technique -- a standard mix of interviews, archive footage, family photos, etc. -- is given a lift by the potency of the subject, and by …
Whit Stillman, the writer and director of Metropolitan and Barcelona, the American Eric Rohmer, wry, witty, wistful, somewhat smug observer of the follies and self-deceptions of slim, attractive, educated, talkative young things in their quest for romantic fulfillment, has here outdone himself. More than that, he has outdone Eric Rohmer. …
The "secret" friendship -- I'll show you my scar, you show me yours -- between a ten-year-old girl and the neighborhood gardener. The fairy-tale substructure is planked down straightaway: the legend of Baba Yaga who eats little children outside the protective city walls; the immaculate gated suburban community called Camelot …
Less than three years after Claude Lelouch dodged the obvious expectations and delivered a clever and original update -- neither a Classics Illustrated nor the Broadway musical -- comes this unclever and unoriginal treatment under the same trusted name. Bille August, giving a gray Nordic chill to the proceedings, and …
Any rising above expectations, any improvement over the past two sequels, is not because new recruit Chris Rock has upped the level of comedy, which was already on overflow, but rather because Hong Kong action star Jet Li has upped the level of melodrama. His stare-down of Mel Gibson on …