Stagy, kitchen-sinky drama about three generations of women in one Soviet apartment: Grandma is paralyzed; the elder daughter can't get her boyfriend to commit; the younger has gotten herself pregnant; Mom is looking for a life of her own. Another of those heralded "advances" in the Russian cinema which nevertheless …
Black comedy for kids, specifically those too young to remember the mid-Sixties television sitcom of the same name. The pattern of inversions is simple to grasp -- the bouquet of rose stems with the blossoms snipped off, the children holding a TV antenna outdoors in a lightning storm -- and …
A mondo-bizarro movie: spare, precise, neatnik images of uniformly loopy characters. ("I wanted to make a film," director Atom Egoyan has stated, "about believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way." Batting average: .333.) The title character is an insurance-claims adjuster who is worshipped as "an angel" at the …
Independent filmmaker Jon Jost -- a one-man team of director, writer, photographer, editor, and pseudonymous musical scorer -- here enters, or approaches, the commercial mainstream (an American Playhouse production) without abandoning his art-movie gimmicks, devices, "strategies": a flat, frontal composition of the back of a spectator's head eclipsing a painting …
Slow-going psychological thriller about an unpublished novelist who, in search of material, insinuates himself into the life of a paroled mass murderer. Lou Diamond Phillips wrote the screenplay with himself in mind as the star, and there is a facileness, a routineness about the writing. But not about the performance …
Barbara Kopple re-enters the arena of her admirable Harlan County, U.S.A., that of the labor dispute. But she has not just repeated herself. The laborers this time are meatpackers instead of mine workers, but more significantly the time itself has moved on into the mid-1980s, the era of Reaganomics, and …
Robust, fast, reckless (unafraid, for example, of giving offense to Native Americans), funny, punny, with much of the footloose imagination of an old Looney Tune: the Land of Plenty is envisioned by the immigrant rodents as a U.S. map with bas-relief plateaus of cheese; a roadside sign of "You Are …
Jane Campion's biography of her New Zealander countrywoman -- author Janet Frame -- was made originally for TV, and for showing in three separate parts at that. Had it been a feature-film project from the start, no doubt its proportions would have been totally different. The chosen narrative technique of …
Two old but opposite friends -- tony Toni and plain Jane -- see each other just once a year for dinner, but see the same therapist all year round. The presence of the latter allows the narrative to skip around freely and easily, and some of the girl-talk drolleries are …
Some gorgeous images of fire, swirling and undulating with almost a shifting-sand, simmering-pot sort of subtlety. Also some standard fireball images of the kind you get when any One-Man Army launches a bazooka rocket into the opposition's ammo dump. And while the finale socks you with spectacular sights at approximately …
In actor/critic Simon Callow’s sole directorial effort, this 1991 Southern Gothic from writers Carson McCullers and Edward Albee stars Oscar®-winners Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine as, respectively, an eccentric moonshine supplier and her ne’er-do-well, convict ex-husband. Based on a book by Carson McCullers first published in 1951, comprising a novella …
The Coen brothers (director Joel, producer Ethan, writers both) cut right to the heart of the role of the artist in Hollywood. They are too much artists themselves, however, to abide any idealizing or universalizing of their proxy on screen: a Broadway Bolshevik (modelled roughly and rudely on Clifford Odets) …
The Disney people, perhaps because their five-year recycling program causes them to lag behind the rising social consciousness and thus opens them to attack from assorted interest groups (Indians re Peter Pan, feminists re Cinderella), seem now, with their thirtieth feature-length cartoon, to spend as much time on Proper Attitudes …
The Disney people, perhaps because their five-year recycling program causes them to lag behind the rising social consciousness and thus opens them to attack from assorted interest groups (Indians re Peter Pan, feminists re Cinderella), seem now, with their thirtieth feature-length cartoon, to spend as much time on Proper Attitudes …
Their Excellent Adventure was an unexpectedly big hit, so its sequel is expectedly bigger: lavish visions of the future, heaven, hell, and points between. The premise is a Terminator-type mission: two "evil twin robots" (twins of Bill and Ted, not of each other) sent back from the future to murder …