Pronounced “dubya.” Oliver Stone’s diplomatic biopic on our forty-third President (Josh Brolin, a dead-on impression, but where to go with it?) is so careful to avoid bias as to avoid purpose. It barely matches the caliber of a TV docudrama, much less the compensating snickers. In that department, Thandie Newton …
Summer vacation after high school and before college: a romance blossoms between a teenage dope peddler and his classmate client, and a bond of friendship forms between the former and the latter’s father, a crazy mixed-up psychiatrist. The action is set back in 1994, but that’s no excuse for the …
Signal the booth announcer: “Today, on the Al Jazeera After School Special, a man’s world as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl. Waad Mohammed stars as Wadjda, the tyke Jonesing for a bike, in this feel-good triumph of the human spirit.” Wadjda had the makings of a masterpiece...in …
H-G Clouzot's "existential" adventure yarn, originally released in the U.S. at 105 minutes in the mid-Fifties, had forty-three minutes restored to it for re-release a quarter-century later. As it turns out, there are almost exactly forty-three minutes till the Latin American hellhole awakens to news of a fire in the …
Pioneers in reverse, from Prosperity, N.M., to St. Louis, Mo., tails tucked between legs. Lumbering Western comedy bears the added burden of being John Candy's last film ("Dedicated to the Memory of ..."). Ellen Greene and Charles Rocket stand out, lonesomely. With Richard Lewis, William Sanderson, Ed Lauter; directed by …
Shoot-from-the-hip political satire about a cooked-up conflict with innocuous Albania in order to deflect attention, two weeks ahead of the election, from a Presidential sex scandal. We briefly hear, never clearly see, the President himself; the principal players are his damage-control trouble-shooter (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin …
Actor Richard E. Grant's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film, set in Swaziland on the verge of its independence, but centering on his messy domestic situation, his cheating mother, his boozing father, and his unceremonious American stepmother, "a common little ex-air hostess." (The title comes from her mimicry of Brit speech affectations.) It …
Deep waste. The ex-con father of a kidnapped boy cannot very well go to the cops after he has shot two of the kidnappers on a public street; the gold-hearted hooker who took part in the kidnapping, but who really dreams of another life on a quiet Mexican beach, will …
Christopher Guest, former member of Spinal Tap, goes off on his own to direct a mock documentary, as well as to play the lead role of Corky St. Clair, Broadway refugee, homosexual stereotype, and the creative mastermind behind the original musical revue in celebration of the sesquecentennial of Blaine, Mo., …
It takes a strong couple to weather life’s battery of unfolding events, particularly when the topic shifts from the petty (pubic hair on a cake of Ivory) to what to do when one’s ex, and the absentee father of their son, is given a death sentence. If Chito refers to …
Davis Guggenheim, the overshadowed director of An Inconvenient Truth, tackles another man-sized topic, American lower education, giving him much more to do than just to film a visually-aided lecture. He delivers his own personalized narration, includes footage from an earlier documentary of his, The First Year, digs up a clip …
Mark Rylance stars as an insouciant Magistrate With No Name, stationed at the outpost of an unspecified border, whose only brush with justice involves a case of pig-poaching. Light carved through a square in the Magistrate’s ceiling heralded a talented eye behind the lens, but nothing prepared me for shadow-sculptor …
A comedy of phoney miracles and true faith, played out against a background of the Cuban missile crisis. This background, and its promise of the Apocalypse, seems as though it ought to be more complementary and supportive than it is. Not only is it not, but, with its fallout-shelter frenzy …
Screenwriter Mark Magill and director Jill Godmilow (Antonia: Portrait of a Woman) conjure up the summer of Gertrude Stein's mysterious and unmentionable illness in the nineteenth year of her relationship with her famous amanuensis, among other things, Alice B. Toklas. They roast marshmallows around the campfire with, among others, Guillaume …
Telejournalist Peter Nicks hired a camera crew to catalog a day in the life of the bustling emergency room of Oakland’s Highland Hospital. Have you ever been to an ER? Waiting times are interminable and tempers fray as uninsured patients lose their patience. What else is new? It’s being billed …