Deplorable cop film from director Ron Shelton, doubly deplorable since it follows so close on the heels of his respectable cop film, Dark Blue. That one, of course, was accorded a delayed and a limited release and was attended by perhaps forty-two paying customers nationwide. This one, having learned its …
No, not a dramatization of the Bobby Goldsboro tune. Rather, the big-screen coming-out party for TV's Dark Angel, Jessica Abs -- oops, Jessica Alba -- as a nightclub bartender, record-store clerk, and hip-hop instructor who dreams of making it in music videos. First-time director Bille Woodruff, who has already made …
The house in question, a modest bungalow within a stone's throw of the Pacific, has been inherited by a subsistence-level housecleaner currently undergoing drug rehab, who gets evicted through a bureaucratic error and her own neglect to open her mail. It is then bought for a song at auction by …
Inoffensive teen romance given instant and ongoing credibility by the presence of Allison Janney as the heroine's recently divorced mother. (A credibility that must withstand the angry-woman cliché of chopping up phallic vegetables for supper, as well as the slapstick indignity of getting humped by the in-laws' dog.) Peter Gallagher, …
The hot-shot ad exec will win the big diamond account if he can first win the private bet that he can make any woman fall in love with him in ten days. But his competition for the account knows that the chosen woman is writing a first-person magazine article on …
Robert Benton's adaptation of a Philip Roth novel feels incontrovertibly bookish: the Big Themes (American race relations, moral hypocrisy, political correctness), the vast historical canvas (Vietnam, World War II), the contextual co-ordinates from current affairs (Viagra, Clinton-Lewinsky), the academic setting (mythical Athena College in rural Massachusetts), the self-analytical literary allusions …
Grueling, grisly chase thriller with Benicio Del Toro as a Rambo-gone-bad -- a Kosovo vet and now a run-amuck "killing machine" -- and Tommy Lee Jones as the Richard Crenna who trained him to kill (but never killed anyone himself) and who alone can unplug the machine. The pursuit encompasses …
Two wealthy American brothers take possession of the dilapidated castle occupied by two English sisters. Who will match up with whom? Literary la-di-da in period costume, from a Dodie Smith novel. With Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas, Bill Nighy, and Tara Fitzgerald; directed by Tim Fywell.
Hokey thriller about a Ten Little Indians-type annihilation of the guests at a remote Nevada motel in a pelting rain. The hokeyness has a rationale, but the rationale is hokey, too. With John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta, Clea DuVall, Rebecca DeMornay, Alfred Molina, and Pruitt Taylor Vince; directed by …
Sun-drenched Italian thriller from the sunstruck director of Mediterraneo, Gabriele Salvatores, concerning a ten-year-old boy who discovers another boy his own age chained in a dungeon-like hole in the ground, and further discovers that his parents are co-conspirators in a kidnapping scheme. Tidy yet tedious, it's a situation that doesn't …
The immigrant experience in Manhattan, more precisely the Sheridan Family experience, as revised and related by Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, etc.). Never a dull moment, it would seem; or anyway never a relaxed, a calm, a common, a mundane, a prosaic …
The tale of two undercover moles, a police officer (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) assigned to infiltrate a ruthless triad by posing as a gangster, and a gangster (Andy Lau Tak-wah) who becomes a police officer in order to serve as a spy for the underworld. The duo finds themselves locked in …
Unmotivated remake of the 1979 spy spoof of the same name: the mild-mannered dentist who gets ensnared in the psychopathic cloak-and-daggery of his daughter's future father-in-law is no longer a dentist but a podiatrist (fun-NY), though the heavy-breathing espionage maneuvers are barely recognizable anymore as comedy. You might have thought …
Disappointing for a Jane Campion film, but a cut above the general run, nonetheless. An erotic thriller by type, adapted from a best-seller by Susanna Moore, it leaves something to be desired in both potential areas of excitation. Perhaps surprisingly (for Campion, again), the woman-in-peril plot looks about as lowbrow …