Costa-Gavras's muckraker-style unmasking of the military regime in Greece, thinly disguised here as a fictitious country. Simple-minded as politics, and even as melodrama, the investigation of a political assassination, conducted by the admirably impartial and relentless Jean-Louis Trintignant, turns up a good deal of quick gratification for Leftist paranoia and …
Antonioni brings his sober regard to the United States and tries to make himself at home amid rebellious youth. He seems considerably tentative, a little ingratiating, a little obsequious, about attaining the correct attitude. And he sometimes seems to let scenes out of his grasp altogether -- the rap session …
A Kevin Smith film, self-explanatorily titled, of incessant dirty-talk, a bit of dirty-do, and a splatter of dirty-doo-doo. It is strictly for those sufficiently sheltered that they’re able to find it daring and sophisticated. Starring Seth Rogen (our reigning Everyslob), Elizabeth Banks, Jason Mewes, Traci Lords, and Justin Long.
Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy about two college lovers, Kapil and Saumya, who get married, but then become mortal enemies. Their plan to go separate ways only begins with divorce. Directed by Laxman Utekar, starring Vicky Kaushal, Sara Ali Khan.
A classically styled heroic myth, set in a remote, thoroughly imagined future society, where there still exists a class division, of a sort, and a hairy, naked, virile Sean Connery fights to restore death to the pale privileged class, cursed with immortality. Frugally made, but not obviously stretched too thin; …
Relatively speaking, an imaginative children's film (from a book by Chris Van Allsburg, author also of The Polar Express and, more relevantly, Jumanji) about two battling brothers from a broken home, ages ten and six-and-three-quarters, who find themselves adrift in outer space inside the "creaky" old house of their absent …
Takeshi Kitano's resuscitation of the sightless samurai from the long-running action series of the Sixties into the Seventies. Kitano's blind swordsman -- or, in his acting persona, Beat Takeshi's blind swordsman -- is also a blond swordsman, and only the devotee will know whether the surprise revelation at the end …
Louis Malle attempts to do the impossible or at least the imprudent: to adapt Raymond Queneau's anarchic comic novel to the screen. Malle's loose visual equivalents to the book's verbal stunts inevitably fall short, but they are not nothing. His compulsive playfulness, while seldom terribly amusing, and often a bit …
A low-key approach to the matter of race relations among Detroit high schoolers. The unknown actors (excepting Ray Sharkey as the Jewish record-shop owner and father of the protagonist) attain a degree of naturalness despite looking too old and having to maintain a sociological forum. Michael Rapaport, N'Bushe Wright, Paul …
A movie every bit as peculiar as its title, from British avant-gardist Peter Greenaway. It is a gorgeous thing to look at, beautifully lit and colored and composed. (The photography is by the distinguished Sacha Vierny, of Belle de Jour, Muriel, Last Year at Marienbad, to name a few.) All …
Woody Allen's documentary parody on a fictitious celebrity of the Twenties and Thirties, known as the "human chameleon." Allen owes something to his own earlier documentary parody, Take the Money and Run, something -- a lot, actually -- to Citizen Kane (the newsreel facsimile), something to Dead Men Don't Wear …
A steady trickle of sap, albeit one from the heart (writer-director Tina Rathborne's). It tells of the alternating raptures and tortures of childhood, or anyway those of a hypersensitive orphan with a Joan-of-Arc complex, raised by a domineering grandmother and sympathetic French governess with a Joan-of-Arc haircut. (The sap flows …