Writer and director and co-star Larry Bishop officiates a shotgun marriage of the biker film and the spaghetti Western: a pig-in-shit frolic. Executive-produced by Quentin Tarantino, Keeper of Low Standards. With Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour, Vinnie Jones, Dennis Hopper, and David Carradine.
The new homeowner just wants to be left alone to drink himself to death, but his next-door neighbor sees the face of God (subtly rendered) in the water stain on the re-stucco. Is it a miracle, a new beginning? Is it significant that the pretty single mom on the opposite …
Candy-colored sequel to two Disney Channel television movies with which the viewer is presumed to be conversant. (In what way, you might have to wonder, did Gabriella change East High forever? And what’s the deal between Troy and Rocket Man?) Evidently intended as an anti-anxiety pill for growing tweens, it …
John Sayles, with his modicum of cinematic acumen, fantasizes a turning point in popular culture, at the Honeydripper Lounge, a roadhouse-of-blues in rural Alabama, 1950, unable to compete with the new jukebox in the joint next door, till the arrival of a train-hopping vagabond toting a homemade electric guitar. The …
Dr. Seuss adulterated: plumped-up graphics (faithful in bare outline); wised-up attitude (vocal impressions of Kissinger and JFK, a martial-arts anime parody); dragged-out storytelling. The elephant’s crossing of a rickety rope bridge is a good sequence (meanwhile, down in minuscule Whoville, a jostled dentist misses the mark with the novocaine needle, …
Deborah Kampmeier’s quasi Carson McCullers coming-of-age tale, set in rural Alabama in the late Fifties, attained some small notoriety, too small to amount to a full-blown controversy, as the Dakota Fanning Rape Movie. That boils it down a bit too far. Needless to say, thirteen-year-old girls have been known to …
Bimbo comedy about an evictee from the Playboy Mansion (a frisky Anna Faris) who becomes house mother to the misfits of Zeta Sorority, helpfully dumbing them down. Admittedly, the anti-intellectualism is balanced by an attempt at smartening up the bimbo, but there is, in every sense, nothing to it. With …
Venerables of the British stage and screen — Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Fricker, Imelda Staunton, Joss Ackland, the late Joan O’Hara — bravely make the best of a bad show as the assorted dotties in a retirement home. Tepid comedy and drama awash in dishwater color. With Hayley Atwell and Orla …
She move pretty good. Her name Rutina Wesley, step-dancin’ fool. But she have troubles, man, big troubles. Her sister O.D., and she drop out of school and go back to the hood, and her only way out be the Step Monster competition in D-Town, fifty G’s on the line. And …
A names-changed adaptation of the memoir by Toby Young (now Sidney Young) on his disastrous stint at Vanity Fair (now Sharps), an impudent Brit-wit, played impudently but not wittily by Britisher Simon Pegg, who aims to breathe a breath of foul air into the Manhattan beau monde. On screen it …
Fictitious countdown of the final six weeks in the twelve-month tour of an army bomb squad in Baghdad. The living and working conditions in a color-free wasteland appear perfectly credible, and the quasi-science-fictional details of the job — the spaceman protective suits, the remote-control bomb-sniffing robot, the tangle of colored …
Camped-up computer cartoon about a humpbacked lackey who bucks the class system in the land of Malaria and aspires to be an evil genius instead of just the lisping, switch-pulling assistant. The backdrops are sufficiently Gothic, but the figures are ghastly, and not in a good way. With the voices …
Paolo Sorrentino, making like an Italian Oliver Stone, rifles through “the Spectacular Life of Giulio Andreotti” (in the words of the subtitle), seven-term Prime Minister rumored to have Mafia ties and blood on his hands, less a character than a caricature in the interpretation of Toni Servillo, jug ears, humpback, …
Writer-director Martin McDonagh, in his feature debut, dispatches two British hit men to lie low, after a job with messy collateral damage, in the “fairy-tale” Medieval town near the coast of Belgium, where one of them (the tousled Brendan Gleeson) is interested in seeing the sights while the other (the …
All right. Agreed. Ang Lee’s heavily psychological Hulk was no world-beater. But did that mean, following in the footsteps of alternative versions of the Batman and Superman series, we wanted a new incarnation of this steroidal superhero, the unjolly green giant, a mere five years later? Action specialist (not master) …