Photojournalists in the early days of the civil strife in Yugoslavia. A Pulitzer winner from Newsweek, trapped inside a collapsed building, is presumed dead, but his wife, who afterwards receives an inaudible long-distance call and tentatively recognizes him (from behind) in news footage on CNN, believes he's still alive. So …
Or for short, Harry Chamber Pot. In the second screen adaptation of a J.K. Rowling children's book, our now pubescent hero fumbles his way to a giant, squirming, slithering basilisk (syn., cockatrice) via a concealed orifice in the girls' lavatory, the haunt of a ghost called Moaning Myrtle: "Harry, if …
WWII movie, revamped for the new millennium in its voguish imagery of alternating monochromes (blue and brown, predominantly) and in the operatic proportions of its protagonist's agonies. Tales of plucky POWs, however, make up a rather minor subdivision of the genre (Stalag 17, The Great Escape, never mind Hogan's Heroes), …
Directed by Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run and The Princess and the Warrior) from an unrealized screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (Red, White, and Blue), this is an apparently harmonious collaboration between a couple of fate-chance-coincidence guys. The extended credits sequence, during which a bomb planted in an office …
Audrey Tatou, the jug-eared gamine of Amélie, the new Geneviève Bujold, appears to have here a role to bring out all of her demented pertness: an over-the-moon loon patiently waiting for her adored cardiologist to dump his pregnant wife and give his heart to her alone. We soon begin to …
Hugely expensive Chinese export, hugely profitable at home, clearly wants to get in on some of that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon action, that flying, floating, backflipping, corkscrewing, slow-motion martial-arts action, an ambition as unexpected from Zhang Yimou as it was from Ang Lee. The hero in question goes by the …
Ashley Judd, under a blanket of makeup, stops making cute faces and starts making other kinds of faces after her picture-perfect husband (Jim Caviezel) is hauled before a court-martial for the long-ago massacre of nine civilians in El Salvador. Seeing as she's a hot-shot Bay Area attorney, she elects to …
Woody Allen, besides writing and directing, plays a has-been filmmaker whose chance at a comeback comes in the form of a bone thrown to him by his former wife -- a $60 million remake of a Forties B-movie -- who is now consort to the philistine head of Galaxy Pictures. …
No disrespect is meant in describing this as a consummate "women's picture." But inasmuch as the major-studio women's picture is practically a thing of the past, it will have to be a high-toned, high-flown one with illustrious literary connections. Two such connections, to be exact, the first to the Pulitzer …
Claude Berri's film has all the qualities you could want in a housekeeper if not all you could want in a film. Efficiency: the "exposition" is taken care of in the fully explored messy apartment during the opening credits. Attention to detail: the bourgeois divorcé tidies up the place beforehand …
On October 30, 1977, three intrepid youths travel across the American landscape, researching a book on unusual roadside attractions. During one pit-stop they encounter petrol station owner Captain Spaulding (exploitation legend Sid Haig, The Big Doll House, Blood Bath) who introduces them to "The Museum of Monsters & Madmen", where …
Highly unusual and no less highly unfunny comedy of Big Themes: animal vs. human, nature vs. civilization, id vs. superego. An ape woman (Patricia Arquette), hairy-chested at the age of twelve, a Queen Kong sideshow act at twenty, a reclusive nature writer as a young adult (best-seller: Fuck Humanity), seems …
Queasy-making entertainment. And not only, or even largely, because of the jiggly, jostly, zoomy, freeze-frame-y camerawork under director Jessie Nelson. No: Sean Penn's impression of a mental defective, complete with a new whisk-broom haircut to add to his tonsorial portfolio, no doubt offers many rewards, not the least of which …
Three mammals and a baby. A computer-animated woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed tiger (your species needs to have an interdental sound in it -- oth ... oth ... ooth -- in order to join this fraternity) on a trek to restore a foundling to his migrating tribe. The wordless prologue …
Three mammals and a baby. A computer-animated woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed tiger (your species needs to have an interdental sound in it -- oth ... oth ... ooth -- in order to join this fraternity) on a trek to restore a foundling to his migrating tribe. The wordless prologue …