Offbeat youth comedy, not offbeat to the exclusion of incessant pop songs on the soundtrack, but offbeat in the extremeness of family dysfunction, or human-race dysfunction -- out there on the path of Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson. First-time writer and director Burr Steers, nephew of Gore Vidal, shows off …
Overfurnished production of the Oscar Wilde farce: so much artifice does not require so much circumstantiation. And the jaunty, jazzy musical score is meddlesome at best, muffling at worst. (In any case it has not remedied the play's sag in the second act.) But the good lines are plentiful, and …
An identity question is posed. (Is Spencer John Olham a weapons scientist or is he an alien replicant with a bomb for a heart?) A chase ensues. And continues for the duration. Frenetic direction by Gary Fleder, in a dark blue fog. With Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D'Onofrio, Mekhi …
Gory odyssey of a self-mutilator who discovers herself, as it were, after an accidental leg gash. This opens up new vistas to her: the spectacle of colleagues eating meat at a business dinner inspires her to cannibalize her own arm, etc. A pretentious indulgence for writer-director-star Marina de Van, and …
The Norwegian policier of a few years earlier, and of the same name, is resettled under the midnight sun of Alaska. Fair enough. (The icy moonscape of the opening aerial shots is no less otherworldly.) Both versions, however, complacently advance a lack of sleep as an explanation for all questionable …
Solemn whimsy, somewhere in reach of The Twilight Zone, in which luck is seen as an occult power, and those who have it compete in an elimination tournament for the right to challenge the reigning Luckiest Man in the World. (Final round: Russian roulette with five bullets and one empty …
A young British surveyor and his older fiancée in a sultry Malaysian trading post in the mid-Twenties. The beastly living conditions they endure are negligible compared with the muddy soundtrack and corroded image. Janet McTeer, Olympia Dukakis, Brenda Fricker, JJ Feild, Tony Maudsley, David Bradley; directed by Kristian Levring.
Werner Herzog digs up another nugget of Odd History: the story of a simple village blacksmith, Polish and Jewish, who sets out for Berlin in 1932 to assume the job of strongman in a theater called the Palace of the Occult, operated by a crank clairvoyant, and closet Jew, with …
Rough stuff from the French misanthrope, Gaspar Noé. An exceedingly brutal rape sets in motion an errant vendetta by the victim's former and current boyfriends: "Fucking B-movie revenge crap," as the former and more reluctant one puts it. (Noé's vision of humanity at large: the shadowy figure who appears at …
Gracefully paced romantic comedy about a couple of wayfaring strangers who meet-cute in a French airport shut down by an air-controllers' strike. It is good to see Juliette Binoche's relentless intensity turned against her for the purposes of comedy -- in the role of a high-strung beautician for whom her …
Director Nick (son of John) Cassavetes kicks around health-care issues and medical ethics in addition to the Little Man hero, whose last name is actually Archibald and not Public: a devoted family man, a regular churchgoer, a hard worker, although the factory has started farming out jobs to Mexico and …
Japanese haunted-house thriller, released in America just ahead of its Hollywood remake, simply called The Grudge. Sympathy may be stirred, if nothing like terror, at the spectacle of low-budget filmmaking reliant on imagination and ingenuity instead of special effects. Narrative context, however, is filled in so sketchily and belatedly that …
A change-partners sexual square dance in a ghastly pallid digital-video image. The image, or part of the image, is scribbled on, now and again, with crude animation; the time sequence is scrambled; and an alternative destiny is thrown in at the end. Affectation is everywhere. With Patrick Breen (who also …
Basketball comedy inspired equally by Tootsie and Dennis Rodman. The bad boy of the Charlotte Beat is cashiered from the league for acting out a Rodman pipe dream: disrobing on court. The only employment he can then find is with a wig and falsies on the city's women's team, the …