A Christmas baby, orphaned in the delivery room and provisionally named Christine ("Sounds like Christmas"), leads a London midwife (Naomi Watts) on a quest for the infant's nearest relative, and straight into the dark heart of the Russian mafia: a deceptively avuncular restaurateur (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his loose-cannon son (Vincent Cassel), …
Standup comic Jo Koy wanted so much to have a sitcom of his own that he pitched what is essentially an audition reel for a theatrical pilot — a bald-faced ripoff of an even more contemptible series of Greek nuptials — that was eventually produced on Spielberg’s dime. It’s My …
Culture-clash comedy, set in Manchester in 1971. A transplanted Paki, who himself has taken an Anglo wife, is for some reason determined that his own sons be brought up in the old way: arranged marriages and no guff. The quest for humor stoops to large quantities of pee-pee, a belated …
Elia Kazan's variation on the Cain-and-Abel theme: an accursed ne'er-do-well and his blessed goody-goody brother compete with one another under the stern, critical eye of their Bible-thumping father. The color and the locales (in John Steinbeck's California, circa World War I) are perceived with the same wide-eyed wonder as the …
Moderately interesting and handsomely photographed examination of homosexuality and its stigmatization in modern China. The central storytelling strategy -- a night-long interrogation, illustrated with flashbacks, of a flauntingly gay writer by a conflicted cop -- is stagnant and tiresome. The film has since been adapted for the stage, rather than …
Not a Jet in sight, nor shark on the menu. Juana, a single Hispanic mother (Diana Elizabeth Torres), laughs in the face of ethnic and cultural bigotry to make it as a sushi chef in this video dropcloth stained with good intentions. Torres does her own impressive cutting board stunt …
Old-fashioned women's picture, true in spirit to the period in which it is set, centered around the dutiful French wife of a Russian émigré who accepts Stalin's limited-time offer of repatriation, post-WWII. Once the couple (plus their small son, for whom the movie has little time) are securely behind the …
Surprisingly bright teen comedy, littered with tidbits of literary and cinematic erudition, about a viral high-school rumor that transmutes a studious virgin into a “dirty skank,” a lesson in “the accelerated velocity of terminological inexactitude.” The path the story takes is not always judicious (the girl plays up her new …
Racing into Rome early one morning, smooth-talking, fast-walking Vittorio Gassman just needs to borrow someone's phone - even sleepy, uptight law student Jean-Louis Trintignant's will do. Bored and with nothing better on tap, the two hit the road in Gassman's souped-up Lancia Aurelia, blazing past farmers, priests, and bicyclists, honking …
Start with Rodney Dangerfield, and proceed on the assumption that it doesn't much matter where you go from there (mother-in-law jokes, son-in-law jokes, drug jokes, fat jokes), and one man's slobbery is soon parlayed into masses. Directed by James Signorelli.
Not a remake of the Rodney Dangerfield rollick, but a Swedish crime thriller brought to American shores under the aegis “Martin Scorsese Presents.” A coke dealer who looks more like a tennis coach (Joel Kinnaman) is forced to draw allegiance with an ex-con (Matias Varela), hunted by criminal and lawman …
An aftermath story, following up on the events of 2012's worlds-colliding drama Easy Money. Lanky Swede JW (a befuddled Joel Kinnaman) is about to score his first supervised release from prison after his violent stint as a coke dealer. Now that he's trying to go straight, he's got something to …
The Vietnam generation's anguish and paranoia about America, acted out in three contrasting styles by Peter Fonda, who strikes mythical postures and meditative profiles, Jack Nicholson, who chews up the scenery and the other actors like an indomitable ham, and, the strongest of the three, Dennis Hopper, who turns in …
Brit aristocrats infiltrated, through marriage, by a classless American flapper. A flat soufflé from a Noel Coward seriocomedy, previously filmed in the silent era by, of all people, Alfred Hitchcock. The jouncing Jazz Age music keeps trying to convince us it’s a romp, with no success. Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, …