Chick-Lit trifle, after the Karen Joy Fowler best-seller, about six contemporary Sacramentoans, five women and an odd man out, who meet informally to discuss the six great Austen novels, one per month, and to demonstrate the books' continued relevance by unconsciously patterning their lives after them. Not too awfully disagreeable, …
Gynocentric parallel lives in Tel Aviv: a broken-hearted catering waitress, a broken-ankled bride, a language-impaired Filipino caregiver, a mute five-year-old. Stretching barely beyond an hour and a quarter, the film doesn’t lead anywhere except a strained poetic end, but it’s engaging enough en route, sprinkled with visual flair. Sarah Adler, …
Former President Jimmy Carter embarks on a book tour of his non-fiction book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" and speaks at various books signings about how peace can be achieved in the Middle East.
A remedial history lesson on U.S. -Saudi relations, behind the opening credits, introduces a hypothetical massacre of a hundred-plus American citizens at an oil-company picnic, the handiwork of an "Osama wannabe." Speedily onto the scene -- where were they on 9/11? -- comes an FBI response team (Jamie Foxx, the …
Twelve-pound ham: Michael Douglas, looking like an escapee of Treasure Island, as a bipolar jazzman dragging along his long-suffering daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) on a quixotic quest for a buried cache of 17th-century doubloons. The background music keeps insisting, to no avail, that this is a romp. Colorful bit part …
From the Khaled Hosseini novel, directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction), a story about a storyteller, and in large part a story truly worthy of a storyteller. The remaining parts are hackneyed and/or hokey. Main elements: two boyhood pals in Kabul, 1978, the sons of master and …
Battle of the sexes update. A bout of drunken casual sex, sans condom, results in a result; and after abortion is given no more thought than it would have been given in 1957, the pair of "completely different people" set about to make it work when it makes no sense: …
Director Craig Gillespie, of the mainstream Mr. Woodcock, indulges the monkeyshines of Ryan Gosling in the part of an antisocial Minnesota Lutheran who seeks happiness in a chaste relationship with an anatomically correct life-size sex doll. Everyone in town loves him too much, for some unapparent reason, to burst his …
Kid-friendly end-of-the-world science fiction (adult-tolerant) revolving around a Seattle brother and sister who find a toybox from the future, and inside it a flop-eared stuffed bunny by the name of Mimzy. The founder and studio head of New Line Cinema, Bob Shaye, trusted himself to direct his first film, and …
Eco-horror film -- or in the words of a heedless oil prospector, "some global-warming shit" -- about nature in revolt at the Arctic Circle. A slow first hour, but eventually a few decent special effects on a flagrantly frugal budget. With Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, and Kevin Corrigan; …
Topics on the table: the war on terror, the lack of a battle plan to wage it, the governmental policy of disinformation, the complicity of the press in all this, the general lowering of journalistic standards, the apathy of the younger generation, the ivory-towerism of academe, and (if that's not …
Oughtn't that to be Live Free AND...? Isn't dying hard, in the lexicon of this series, a desirable thing? (It ain't over till the bald guy says, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.") Bruce Willis, a dozen years since he last got into the part of John McClane, is still in good shape, but …
George Gallo’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film, extra-earnest, middling-maudlin, about a teenage old-fashioned representational landscape painter who nuzzles under the wing of a cantankerous old Russian impressionist, one summer in Pennsylvania in the mid-Seventies (that’s 1970s, not 1870s). It dishes out a lot of fundamental art talk, only once verging on the …
Respectable directing debut by the veteran screenwriter of The Interpreter, Minority Report, Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Malice, etc., Scott Frank. Suffering brain damage in a car wreck four years earlier, still having trouble with his memory and his "sequencing" and his "disinhibition," writing memos to himself like the protagonist …