Something like the twentieth feature film of the nonagenarian Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, still largely unknown in the U.S. In the circumstances, it would be churlish to say that it's a trifle boring: far better to be bored by a ninety-three-year-old who makes a film to please only himself …
Former lovers rekindle the flame after forty-plus years. Paul Cox's civilized film is certainly an uncommon notion of screen romance (he had given the elderly their due in A Woman's Tale as well), but it is not without its dips into bathos. The simple-minded and largely redundant flashbacks to youthful …
One of the rare late-period Godard films to be circulated commercially over here. Why this one? Virtually -- or maybe we should say virtuously -- void of narrative (something to do with memory, history, and a fictitious filmmaker's inchoate project on love and the ages of man), arid, abstemious, prickly, …
A dealing-with-tragedy movie (a summer romantic idyll turned violent) with dangerous tendencies toward a Lifetime Channel original. But first-time director Todd Field proves himself to be a true director, cunning in his omissions, his obliqueness, his attention to off moments, his focus on marginal details: the family photos in the …
Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) and director Patrice Chereau (Queen Margot, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) combine to bring the British kitchen sink into the French boudoir. Or vice versa. Two Angst-ridden Londoners -- a bartender and a small-time actress, the …
Small bore, with big ambitions, about a dark-eyed dark-haired high-school grad (the blandly pretty Jordana Brewster) who follows the European trail of her blue-eyed blond sister (Cameron Diaz), accompanied on the soundtrack by an aggressively sensitive New Age guitar, to find out why the elder one killed herself. The present-tense …
Dramatization of John Bayley's two tributes to his novelist wife, Iris Murdoch: Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris. The back-and-forth between early Iris (Kate Winslet) and Alzheimer's Iris (Judi Dench) keeps the film from ever quite getting going, though there's an undeniable poignancy in the spectacle of a meticulous …
Danish romantic comedy made in strict adherence to the Dogma '95 guidelines for unwatchable cinematography. Pity, because the loose-knit cast of characters -- a widowed pastor, a cranky restaurateur, a shy hotelier, a clumsy baker, a somber hairdresser, and a sunny Italian waitress -- is not without its charms and …
Brutally boring road movie revolving around a feckless karaoke singer (Jon Gries), his unbeneficial manager (Garrett Morris), and a sententious unseen narrator (Patrick Bauchau): "Observation and perception are two separate things." Mark and Michael Polish, the twin brothers responsible for Twin Falls, Idaho (co-writing it while Michael alone was directing …
Inbred Kevin Smith comedy arranges a kind of get-together of the casts of his four earlier comedies -- Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Shannen Doherty, Joey Lauren Adams, Brian O'Halloran, etc. -- but with the titular slackers (Jason Mewes, disturbingly credible, and Smith himself, disturbingly not) brought …
Sophomoric horror show about a couple of college kids -- a bickersome brother and sister -- terrorized by the bogeyman, no less, on a lonely country road that connects to an incongruously populous diner and police station. Limited means and imagination, though a surplus of let's-put-on-a-show enthusiasm. With Justin Long …
David Spade's "white-trash idiot" looks all right in the externals: the metal-band T-shirts, the haircut "like Jane Fonda in Klute." But his creamy-nougat center seems dictated by Adam Sandler's Secrets of Success (Sandler, indeed, is one of the executive producers); and the hot blonde in blue-jean cutoffs (Brittany Daniel: she …
Nothing much. A white-collar cog becomes a sudden celebrity when he challenges the company bully to a rematch. Occasion for sitcom moralizing ca. 1959. With Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Hayden Panettiere, Kelly Lynch, Patrick Warburton, and Jim Belushi directed by John Pasquin.
Cheerfully corrupt, toothless satire on teenage consumerism and conformism, as dictated by subliminal messages in pop music. The movie is as much an accomplice as a commentator, with special prominence granted to Target, Revlon, Bounce, MTV, among innumerable others. The titular rock trio, wearing leopard ears and sounding a lot …
A pair of female cavers risk their lives for the thrill of discovery in this IMAX documentary.