Very professional, very proficient job by Laurent Cantet, director of Time Out , who here details the activities of lonely, middle-aged, largely American women (the vulnerable Karen Young and steely Charlotte Rampling, most prominently) at a Haitian resort in the Baby Doc era, enjoying the easy but not free companionship …
The directorial debut of Chris Terrio offers a small-world view of New York, where everyone is separated not by the proverbial six degrees but by more like two. A male ex-lover of a bisexual photographer called Benjamin Stone ("Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Benjamin Stone -- the Holy Trinity") has arrived …
The '63 Volkswagen Bug with a mind of its -- er, his -- own (also a libido of his own: antenna coming to full alert at the sight of a late-model cab-yellow Beetle) is reclaimed from Crazy Dave's Scrap and Salvage and spruced up for the NASCAR circuit. Insipid kiddie …
To speed his daughter's recovery from her mother's sudden death, a Manhattan psychotherapist whisks her upstate to a Gothic monstrosity, big enough to house a family of twenty, on the edge of a deep dark woods, where she seems to sprout into a Bad Seed. But is her imaginary new …
Further unpleasantness from the always unpleasant David Cronenberg. Despite the pretentious-sounding title, this is in no sense an historical record of violence as a human fundamental (dating back, say, to Cain and Abel, or farther back to the appearance of the monolith among the apes in 2001), but merely a …
An anonymous Date Doctor, working by personal referrals only, dispenses self-help slogans ("With no guile and no game, there's no girl") and empirical pearls of wisdom ("Eight out of ten women believe that one kiss will tell them everything they need to know about a relationship") to a select group …
End-of-the-world science fiction as filtered through the sensibility of zany, nutty, Monty Python-y British humor. The trendy, youthy, culty Douglas Adams book, now a quarter of a century old, demonstrates itself to be less than timeless. With Martin Freeman, Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, and the voice of Alan …
Times two. A small-town sheriff, and burnt-out big-town SWAT negotiator, faces a hostage crisis at a fortified hillside mansion, but the head of the house has connections to big-time criminals, who then take the sheriff's family hostage, too, to compel his co-operation. Brassy, bombastic suspense film, with a host of …
The writing and directing debut of David ("Mulder") Duchovny is a coming-of-age film of mortifying immaturity. At its outset, Duchovny is an American artist living in Paris, narrating in that flat affect of his, telling us of a secret which he has harbored since his thirteenth birthday, and which he …
Hayao Miyazaki, the doyen of anime, creates here a dreamworld that doesn't so much pull the spectator into it as push him towards his own: more snore than howl. It certainly doesn't lack for imaginative detail. On the contrary, it could have made do with a little less. The titular …
Hayao Miyazaki, the doyen of anime, creates here a dreamworld that doesn't so much pull the spectator into it as push him towards his own: more snore than howl. It certainly doesn't lack for imaginative detail. On the contrary, it could have made do with a little less. The titular …
Hayao Miyazaki, the doyen of anime, creates here a dreamworld that doesn't so much pull the spectator into it as push him towards his own: more snore than howl. It certainly doesn't lack for imaginative detail. On the contrary, it could have made do with a little less. The titular …
An article of nouveau blaxploitation, a throwback even as to the chintziness of the production, centered around a small-time Memphis pimp and pusher, too cool to enunciate, who agrees to accept a kiddie keyboard as payment for a quarter bag, and sets out from there down the path of artistic …
Directed by the consistently lightweight Harold Ramis, this incomprehensible embezzling caper, off-puttingly flippant in tone, nonetheless generates an atmospheric sense of weather and of environment: Christmas in Wichita, under a freezing rain, on skating-rink roads, around and about the seedy strip clubs and massage parlors, names like Tease-o-Rama, The Sweet …