Documentary about the life and work of Sarah Cannon, aka Minnie Pearl. Sarah was a serious, educated woman who had once dreamed of becoming a Shakespearean actress, but she found fame playing a simple country girl who often made herself the butt of her jokes. Instantly identifiable – even in …
Italian women's film, from Turkish-born filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek, filtered through the sensibility of a vaguely discontented wife, a drudging accountant in a Roman chicken factory and a moonlighting pastry chef too old (at thirty) to start anew as an apprentice baker, with a shiftless husband currently on the night shift, …
Morbid remembrance of the blip-like rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick, tricked out with pseudodocumentary gimmicks by the sometime documentarist George Hickenlooper. Andy Warhol, well mimicked by Guy Pearce, is not hard to make into a compelling figure. But Sedgwick -- elevator heiress, socialite, art groupie, temporary "it" girl, drug …
A respectable addition to Bukowskiana, if respectability can be a criterion for the life and work of the pickled writer, Charles Bukowski. A mangily bearded Matt Dillon, in the part of the author's semi-autobiographical stand-in, Henry Chinaski, gives a full-bodied performance, and a literally full-body one, his head tilted backwards …
Or: I Was a Teenage Body Snatcher. Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2), a dehumanized cine-cannibal in his own right, seems to feel that self-conscious acknowledgment of his pilfered sources constitutes sufficient originality: here, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which in turn was "a blatant rip-off of The Puppet Masters." …
Or: I Was a Teenage Body Snatcher. Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2), a dehumanized cine-cannibal in his own right, seems to feel that self-conscious acknowledgment of his pilfered sources constitutes sufficient originality: here, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which in turn was "a blatant rip-off of The Puppet Masters." …
A lot of knowledge went into the characterization of the movie-buff hero, beginning with his ritual of going through the coming week's TV Guide and circling the movies not to be missed (99 River Street, The Big Sleep, etc.), and continuing through his wardrobe, his bedroom decor, his job, his …
Something very close to a sex comedy for grownups. John Turturro writes, directs, and stars in the carefully crafted, beautifully shot story of Fioravante, a strong, silent-type florist who agrees to do a favor for an old friend (Woody Allen) whose NYC bookstore has just gone out of business. It …
What Carlos Saura did for the art of flamenco and tango in films called Flamenco and Tango, he now sets out to do for that soulful Portuguese folk song, dating back to the early 19th Century, the fado. A spacious and spare studio, translucent partitions, process screens, backdrops, mirrors, colored …
Michael Moore’s output during the Obama years confirms the obvious: just as a ship needs a rudder, the director is nothing without a Republican commander-in-chief to shepherd his contempt. Still, credit Moore with finding fault in Mrs. Clinton’s pampered approach to politics. (His was the only liberal voice to predict …
Michael Moore's blistering critique of the Bush administration in toto and its War on Terror in particular (just in time for the 2004 presidential campaign, too) is at bottom a pair of devil's horns drawn on the head of Dubya. But if Moore were only making fun, he'd only be …
Failure to protect is a charge aimed at punishing a negligent parent who failed to safeguard a child from serious harm. Years ago I worked for a woman whose ex-husband copped to twice pleasuring himself while their 4-year-old son slept next to him. Looking to remove the boy from a …