Second screen version (after Burt Kennedy’s grindhouse one in 1976) of Jim Thompson’s kinky crime novel, kept in the original Fifties period, with the choirboyish Casey Affleck, and his quaky, croaky, pubescent voice, in the part of the psycho deputy sheriff of a West Texas small town, outwardly much less …
Gruesome but unconcernedly lighthearted monster movie featuring a thirty-foot Asian crocodile who has somehow migrated to backwoods Maine. The dialogue, by the TV writer-producer David E. Kelley, has some snap and crackle, and Bridget Fonda is especially funny as a paleontologist who has no field experience but is not hesitant …
Another (after Kill Me Again and Red Rock West) homage to film noir by John Dahl. More narrowly, an homage to the resident femme fatale (Linda Fiorentino, with hooded eye, clamped jaw, uninflected voice -- a cartoon figure). So awed is the filmmaker that he can throw up no resistance …
"Men are always looking for something better. Women settle for what they get." That's the war cry of Lola (Greta Gerwig), after being unceremoniously kicked to the curb by her dreamy but hopelessly hollow boyfriend, Luke (human-Oreck Joel Kinnaman), three weeks prior to the ceremony. Lola is constantly finding something …
The excitement of David Lynch's return to the big screen, ending an absence of five years, starts to taper off steadily after the breathless credits sequence of automobile headlights gobbling up an infinite dotted yellow line underneath the retro pulp-paperback lettering. It -- the excitement, such as it is -- …
Nora Ephron, in a sort of comic counterpart to A Simple Plan, tells what happens to the people, and those around them, who successfully scam the Pennsylvania State Lottery for six-point-four million, but who then must find somebody else to cash in the ticket: a "beard." It isn't pretty, and …
Cherien Dabis (Amreeka) writes, directs, and stars in the story of May, a New York writer-type who made bank off her heritage — a book of meditations on Middle Eastern proverbs (just like the ones that serve as title cards!) — and is now returning home to Jordan to get …
The very engaging stand-up comic and sitcom star Ellen DeGeneres takes her very individual sense of timing and emphasis, her essential down-to-earthiness and her flutters of lighter-than-airiness, to the big screen. (Not counting her bits in the documentary Wisecracks.) The material is little more than an extended date-from-hell routine, and …
Jaunty dark comedy, vacillating between the chaotic and the sloppy, to do with family dysfunction, college chemistry, anthropology, anthropophagy, adultery, kidnapping, revenge. Writer-director Randall Miller, tripping over big words, lacks the ear for academia, to say nothing of the eye for cinema. His cast carries over key members of his …
Respectably black comedy, even if really only charcoal-gray, and disappointingly rosy at the end. A nice young couple kidnap the wife of the clothing manufacturer who has stolen their idea for a Spandex Miniskirt. They want half a million or they'll kill her (just bluffing). But the businessman, who has …
Not, as the title may have led you to suppose, an ingenious blend of two novels by D.H. Lawrence. Rather, the "rainbow" and "serpent" turn out to be Haitian for "good" and "evil," and there are other such ethnological nuggets buried here, too. (The movie is based -- like that …
Laboring black comedy centering around a post-coital corpse in a hotel room. Bill Pullman, as an unconfidant vertical-blind salesman, gets good results for his pains. And Carrie Fisher gets some too, without breaking a sweat. But they're not the stars of the show. Kirstie Alley is, and she huffs and …
Mel Brooks does to space opera what he did in Blazing Saddles to horse opera, only a great deal worse. You can try to find sophistication in his self-conscious gags about the film itself, about the potential sequel to it, about the videocassette of it, about the merchandising of it; …
Having treated the man who put life online — Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — screenwriter Aaron Sorkin now turns his attention to the man who put it into the machine. (Not for nothing is the Apple co-founder so desperate to have the Mac say "Hello" at its unveiling.) Once again, …