Documentarists Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet, Common Threads, et al.) try their hands at narrative film, or docudrama, or maybe just simulated documentary, showing little storytelling sense. The central action, if one can be pinpointed, is the 1957 obscenity trial of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s titular …
The feature-film debut of writer-director Dan Harris is a coping-with-suicide comedy, or dramedy at the very most, and lukewarm either way, about the aftershocks of an Olympic hopeful's abrupt exit. Those left behind include Emile Hirsch, a sort of cross between Leo DiCaprio and Clea DuVall, as the unathletic younger …
Substantially the same story as Capote a year earlier, an uncomfortable proximity that brings to mind the competing Columbuses of 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus or the competing Earps of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. A second account, written and directed by Douglas McGrath, of the birth pains of …
Respectable directing debut by the veteran screenwriter of The Interpreter, Minority Report, Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Malice, etc., Scott Frank. Suffering brain damage in a car wreck four years earlier, still having trouble with his memory and his "sequencing" and his "disinhibition," writing memos to himself like the protagonist …
Squarely in the line of those semi-documentary exposés of the Fifties, Captive City, Phenix City Story, New Orleans Uncensored, et al., although the emphasis has shifted, as the title would indicate, from How Shocking That Such Things Could Happen Here to How Amazing That Anyone Would Do Anything About It. …
Kids: stay in school, especially if you plan on becoming an astronaut. When a freak accident (wind-loosed antenna piercing bio-monitor) leads to his being stranded on the red planet, astro-botanist Matt Damon decides he ain't got time to muse on fate, the fragility of existence, or man's place in the …
Twilight Zone-ish moralistic fantasy about two modern teens who are transported into the black-and-white world of a Fifties sitcom, and who succeed bit by bit, against stout resistance, in colorizing it. Let's overlook the current cultural parochialism that equates black-and-white with the dull, the drab, the stunted, the repressed, the …
A movie by, but not with, Woody Allen. And the inevitable question to ask with any Woody Allen movie -- who's the inspiration this time, Fellini or Bergman? -- can be answered as follows: Fellini, specifically The White Sheik, the one about the provincial honeymooner who gets to meet in …
Hackneyed vacation comedy (it could almost have a National Lampoon's in front of its title) about a horse's-ass dad who rents an eyesore motor home, christened by his children the Rolling Turd, in an effort to fulfill family obligations and keep an important business engagement at the same time. Well …
A Hipper-Than-Thou romantic comedy centered around a woman who sports a Louise Brooks haircut and accordingly calls herself "Lulu," listens to a steady diet of Third World rock, reads biographies of people like Frida Kahlo and Winnie Mandela, sips Seagram's 7 from dawn till lights-out, makes left-hand turns across three …
Complex relationship film. Parents and children, husband and wife, brother and brother, in the main, but supplementarily wife and lover, male professor and female student, older boy and new girlfriend, among others. The uncommon specificity as to time and place and cultural milieu -- 1986, Brooklyn, the bourgeois intelligentsia -- …
The Americanization of a BBC miniseries qualifies as a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, and from more than one type of headline: the political sex scandal, the privatization of the military, the death throes of newspapers. The topicality inevitably gives rise to some soapboxing, and along with it some playing on the pieties …
Ernest Thompson, the author of On Golden Pond, probes the depths of adult heterosexual relations, and satisfies himself at every turn with the adolescent, the glib, the flip, the cute. The action -- one couple falling out of love, another couple falling into it -- is divided into episodes with …
James Brooks's first feature seems somewhat presumptuous, or maybe just overgeneralized, about the bond between a single mother and an only daughter (Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, respectively), as though no special insight were called for. None is called for very often, in any event, since the movie chooses to …
Espionage interlaced with education. A range of Muslim beliefs and attitudes emerges in the course of an FBI crackdown on a terrorist network. Fiercely acted by all concerned (Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Neal McDonough, Jeff Daniels), but rather frivolously resolved, and the camera is prone to excitability at …