Comedy of sexual confusion, revolving around an Icelandic couch potato who has a New Year's Eve fling with his mother's lesbian lover ("I never cheated on my mother before"). That partner, a Spanish flamenco dancer, turns up pregnant at the same time as the potato's unwanted girlfriend. Tart, earthy, thick-skinned, …
Plus assorted other breeds, plus one loquacious parrot, plus a rehabilitated (not for long) Cruella De Vil ("Please, call me Ella"). A higgledy-piggledy incoherent mess, busy enough and loud enough to distract the little ones, and dismay the bigger. Glenn Close, Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Evans, Gerard Depardieu; directed by Kevin …
You know where it'd be cool to live? California! They do fun stuff there!
We already knew that Jay Ward's Rocky and His Friends was the hip kids' show of the Sixties. Now we know that screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan and director Des McAnuff knew it, too. But knowing it and being it are two different things. The mumbo-jumbo that permits the three inept villains …
Scowlingly serious French film -- as the shot of carrion crows picking at the spilled entrails of a woodland creature soon makes plain. Or as the name of director André Téchiné had made plain beforehand. For all his soberness and somberness, Téchiné has put together an odd and colorful patchwork …
From the Cormac McCarthy novel, a post-WWII cowboy movie, not quite a purebred Western, a little like The Hi-Lo Country. A little (including in that scope the scrumptious Penelope Cruz), but not a lot. And it is, whatever its constitution, more than director Billy Bob Thornton can chew. The opening …
Cameron Crowe's most "personal" film to date, a nostalgia trip into the rock-and-roll scene of the early Seventies. The names have been changed, to cover up, perhaps, for revisions or lapses of memory, and for ingrained tendencies to sanitize and whitewash. The fifteen-year-old free-lance rock journalist -- Crowe's stand-in -- …
Rough and raw documentary by the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert: rough and raw in treatment as much as in subject. And highly educational, too, though it fails to provide a full answer to the innocent question of why pimps are necessary. The names of the garrulous participants are an …
Knocking-kneed adaptation of the "controversial" novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Director and co-scriptwriter Mary Harron, keeping the story in the Reagan era (mobile phones as big as shoes), or in other words keeping it daintily at arm's length, wants to be double-sure that you know it's a satire -- as …
The Traffic route to "complexity": three interlocked storylines under one umbrella. All of them, set alike in Mexico City, have to do with one kind or another of love, and all of them involve dogs and varying degrees of cruelty thereto. The one point of intersection shared by all three …
Lush, loud, furious, preposterous espionage thriller, something to do with a pending Chinese Trade Agreement and ongoing attempts to scuttle it. The too-much-too-soon opening is as indigestible as any recent James Bond pre-credits sequence. But Wesley Snipes, although incontestably a superspy, is at least not supercilious about it. And there …
Joan Chen's worlds-apart followup to her first film, Xiu Xiu, the Sent-Down Girl, brings together Richard Gere and Winona Ryder as the perfect couple: he'll never grow up, and she'll never grow old. (Peter Pan Complex and heart condition, respectively.) A cure is possible, for either or both, but not …
An ex-con is used by police to lure a criminal out of hiding.
A daughter's documentary on her elusive and unavailable father, Ramblin' Jack Elliott (the descriptive adjective, we learn, refers as much to tongue-looseness as to footlooseness), born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in 1931, son of a middle-class Jewish doctor in Brooklyn, teenage runaway, self-made cowboy, protégé of Woody Guthrie, precursor of Bob …