Crassly cynical celebration of fame and success no matter how ill-gotten. (Just what we need from Hollywood.) The occasion is a "biopic" on the self-promoting Valley of the Dolls author, Jacqueline Susann, a personage not so much portrayed by Bette Midler as invaded, taken over, occupied by her. And it …
Spiritual and geographical journey of a junkie nicknamed Fuckhead, in the early 1970s (more progress geographically, perhaps, than spiritually). The incidents, lifted from a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories by Denis Johnson, have something of the talkative drug addict's boring desire to astonish and proneness to embellish. But the one …
Stanley Tucci's third directing effort (his second solo), all starring himself, all period pieces, all dealing with one or another aspect of the Artistic Temperament, only this one based on fact. In it, Tucci plays the Southern-bred New Yorker staff writer Joe Mitchell, who profiles a true-blue bohemian with darker …
Barren and banal lives in Babylon, Long Island, the old stomping ground of first-time filmmaker Eric Mendelsohn. An ensemble piece, meaning that the barrenness and banality are spread as wide as the Mojave. (There is a ready-made poignance about the late Madeline Kahn musing to herself that she still feels …
Edward Norton, making his directorial debut, shares screen time with Ben Stiller in the roles of boyhood pals who've gone separate but parallel ways -- priest and rabbi -- as hip, happening, new, now, popular, popularizing, palm-slapping types of clergymen. In short, "the God Squad." Then the Third Musketeer from …
A blunt and downright rude image consultant (Bruce Willis, smirking with impunity) confronts his stifled Inner Child -- literally -- when his eight-year-old self, or in other words his self of thirty-two years earlier, suddenly pops up, pudgy, mop-headed, mush-mouthed, in a loud red windbreaker, and without even the flimsiest …
The thesis, so to speak, of one of the Danish founding fathers of the Dogma 95 school, Kristian Levring: a kind of survival tale in which a busload of travellers from a broken-down airplane are driven the wrong way into the African desert in the dark, where they run out …
Perfect strangers all over Madrid are making appointments to meet at Puerta del Sol on a scorching summer day. A comedy of missed connections and mistaken identities -- slight, sleazy, unamusing. With Carlos Fuentes, Mercé Pons, Jesús Cabrero, Alberto San Juan, Concha Valasco; written and directed by Juan Luis Iborra …
The basic situation -- that of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy whose long tenure in County Cork causes them to sympathize and identify with the Irish in their fight for independence, post-WWI, even though the Irish natives do not return the affection -- is inherently interesting, and is made more so, or …
Another Robert Redford literary adaptation (what else?), complete with a voice-over narration almost as nagging as that of A River Runs through It. The narrator is an uncredited Jack Lemmon, suffering a prefatory heart attack on the golf course, lying flat on his back in the rough off the fairway, …
Vintage Jackie Chan, ca. 1994, retitled, re-recorded, re-released. (Drunken Master 2, originally.) Some of the stunts command respect, but not so much as to offset the silliness and tedium. Words of wisdom from the kung-fu master: "Many drunken boxers become nothing more than drunken fools." Directed by Lau Ka Leung.
From a quarter-century away, Volker Schlöndorff returns to the battleground of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the "glory days" of Left-wing terrorism in Germany, when concepts such as "imperialism," "oppression," "pigs," "the ruling class," "revolution," etc., were freely bandied about. Coolheaded, nonjudgmental, perhaps a touch nostalgic, the filmmaker knows …
Three-hour French costume piece covering decades in the life -- early 20th Century -- of a disillusioned reverend turned industrialist. Painfully slow in spite of (or partly on account of) a hectic visual style: haphazard cutting, a groping, staggering camera. An appetite for antique costumes will be satisfied in any …
The inspirational story of the "Jewish Jackie Robinson," the six-foot-four Detroit Tiger first baseman and left fielder in the Thirties and Forties, a magnet at the time for ethnic slurs and a stronger magnet for ethnic pride. (The anecdote of an on-field run-in between the veteran Greenberg and the rookie …
Starring Adam Sandler. By now, that much -- that little -- should be a sufficient review. To say that he plays the weakling son of Satan -- to say that he plays him as if afflicted with a humpback, a clubfoot, cerebral palsy, throat cancer, and limp lifeless hair -- …