The title is taken from the prefatory narration of a one-time mental patient diagnosed with an ill-defined Borderline Personality Disorder: "Maybe I was crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted." Kinship with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has been intimated, but …
Superficial portrait of porn star Stacy Valentine — or maybe it goes as deep as the person — made up of old home movies, school photos, family snapshots, clips from her films, and principally Christine Fugate's fuzzy, dull, nonprurient footage of her: on the set (where she must battle ants …
A flaky French pastry molded around a twenty-two-year-old suicidal gamine and the middle-aged professional knife-thrower who recruits her (from the bottom of the Seine) as his nothing-to-lose assistant. Or in another word, target. The capering camera, when it can manage to sit still (when it is not, for example, buzzing …
Sidney Lumet's remake of the atypically conventional and commercial John Cassavetes film of 1980. If you could think of the central figure of the gunmoll-cum-babysitter as a repertory role on a par with Hedda Gabler or Lady Macbeth, then you might allow that Sharon Stone does a rock-hard New York …
Minor mishap from the maker of Swingers. Doug Liman's underfunded and overrated first film at least had a pretense of social observation within a restricted radius of reality, though even there he showed signs of excessive awareness of the audience and his effect on it. Observation tended to be outbalanced …
Julia Sweeney always seemed one of the more human and likable of the Saturday Night Live alums. The filmed record of her one-woman stage show, detailing her brother's and her own concurrent bouts with cancer, makes her seem more of each. Although she is also credited as director, it does …
Jadedly facetious film noir, featuring candied photography, pretzelled plotting, "ironic" musical selections, a cynical quipster ("I don't trust anybody over ten who listens to The Sound of Music") and a sanctimonious straight man as cop partners. All very studied and superficial. No emotional undertow. No ripple, for that matter, of …
An interesting modification and extension of the theatrical effects that director Carlos Saura (and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) developed and perfected in Flamenco and Tango: the play of colored lights, the illuminated screens, the transparent scrims, so that what appears to be a solid wall, for example, will dissolve before our …
Overpraise The Shawshank Redemption, and this is what you deserve. Frank Darabont, the writer and director of both, raises an eyebrow of interest for his apparent dedication to breathing some life into the prison genre (pretty well flatlined since Escape from Alcatraz), but the eyebrow might decline into a scowl …
Overpraise The Shawshank Redemption, and this is what you deserve. Frank Darabont, the writer and director of both, raises an eyebrow of interest for his apparent dedication to breathing some life into the prison genre (pretty well flatlined since Escape from Alcatraz), but the eyebrow might decline into a scowl …
Little doodle on the theme of the older man and the very young woman, the directorial debut of screenwriter Audrey Wells. The knowledge that she wrote the script for The Truth about Cats and Dogs will not help this film's star, Sarah Polley, to escape physical comparison (pointy little teeth …
A grossly, crassly commercial "indie" in which a couple of escaped convicts boost an RV and are mistaken in the next town for its owners: homosexual impresarios of a kiddie talent contest, Little Miss Fresh Squeezed. From what we see of their masquerade it is hard to imagine how they …
Ostensible remake of Robert Wise's ghostly classic of 1963. Certainly there looks to be a lot of similarity in the basic configuration of four people — two men, two women, one of the former a research scientist, one of the latter a lonely shut-away who has only recently been liberated …
Time-capsule exoticism centering around a free-thinking Englishwoman in search of Sufi wisdom in Morocco, 1972, with her two young daughters in tow. More travelogue than narrative — an effect heightened by the montage-y brevity of most of the scenes — but nice bright color. And director Gillies MacKinnon, who handled …