Unremittingly cute, and on a couple of occasions actually funny, this supernatural romantic comedy adds a new wrinkle to the conventional ghost story, and new rules (anything goes) into the bargain. The new wrinkle is that the previous tenant who haunts a breathtaking San Francisco apartment as an intermittent apparition, …
A twelve-year-old Texan, after the death of his leukemic older brother, inherits the responsibility of keeping alive the oral history of their illustrious ancestor, the 11th-century Persian poet, astronomer, and mathemetician. Most of the film is made up of reverential re-enactments from the Great Man's life, not lavishly, but adequately …
Or, One More Reason Why the Middle East Hates the West. Back, back, back to the 12th Century, back to before the Third Crusade ("To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven"), equipped with cultural relativism, vats of blood, miles of slow-motion, and wave after …
Low-key, life-sized little indie, adapted from Gerald Shapiro's Bad Jews and Other Stories, marks the feature directing debut of Peter Riegert, the likable leading man (if more often a supporting man) of such cherishables as Local Hero and Crossing Delancey. He is the leading man here as well, and still …
Self-reflexive, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, and self-mocking pastiche of the private-eye genre, the directorial debut of screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, The Long Kiss Goodnight, in chronological rather than alphabetical order). The hard-boiled first-person narrator, the chronically insouciant Robert Downey, Jr. ("I was tired, I …
The stranger who, in the nervous days before WWII, washes up on the Cornish shore, and into the lives of two elderly sisters, proves to be a Polish violin prodigy, whose sweet sounds catch the ear of a neighboring beauty on holiday, the sister of a world-famous maestro. A not …
Completion of the "revenge trilogy" of Chan-wook Park, beginning with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and passing through Oldboy. In the final installment, independent of the others, the abstract credits sequence of creeping vine, blossoming blood, and coursing teardrop is a true grabber, and the opening scene doesn't let go: a …
Completion of the "revenge trilogy" of Chan-wook Park, beginning with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and passing through Oldboy. In the final installment, independent of the others, the abstract credits sequence of creeping vine, blossoming blood, and coursing teardrop is a true grabber, and the opening scene doesn't let go: a …
American Nightmare about a Bosnian brother and sister who flee the Balkan Wars for Chicago, where the eye-patched brother pimps for his language-handicapped sister (among others), and the sister furtively studies English from Dr. Seuss. A cheerful Chinese sculptor offers her the prospect of a better life. Crass exploitation filmmaking, …
George A. Romero's zombie trilogy turns into a tetralogy. Four zombie films seem more than enough for a single filmmaking career, even one that extends almost four decades, and even with an interval of twenty years between the third and the fourth. Zombies, at least as envisioned in his Night …
Zero. The obligatory sequel finds our mid-19th-century Batman in marital trouble, continually called away to fight for California statehood and never able to get away on a vacation with the wife and kid, now ten years old even though it's only seven years since the previous installment. "If you walk …
The Dardenne brothers of Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have become dependable providers of coarse-grained slices of lower-class life, thicker in credibility than in captivation, but still thicker than most films in both. The title of this one, which translates as The Child, would seem to refer not so much to …