Conventional Hollywood "biopic" on an unconventional subject of study: the ignored, ridiculed, and campily canonized director of Plan 9 from Outer Space. The disrepute, or nonrepute, of the central figure liberates the film to engage in the kind of myth-making in which the "biopic" once engaged with impunity, but which …
J.K. Rowling goes full Dickens (or at least Dickensian) in an absolute dreary slog of a story full of mysterious bloodlines, secret and/or forbidden and/or frustrated love affairs, unfeeling social mores, class struggle, wretched bureaucracy, fractured families, and awkward allegories. Oh, and a big, weird speech from Johnny Depp as …
J.K. Rowling goes full Dickens (or at least Dickensian) in an absolute dreary slog of a story full of mysterious bloodlines, secret and/or forbidden and/or frustrated love affairs, unfeeling social mores, class struggle, wretched bureaucracy, fractured families, and awkward allegories. Oh, and a big, weird speech from Johnny Depp as …
J.K. Rowling goes full Dickens (or at least Dickensian) in an absolute dreary slog of a story full of mysterious bloodlines, secret and/or forbidden and/or frustrated love affairs, unfeeling social mores, class struggle, wretched bureaucracy, fractured families, and awkward allegories. Oh, and a big, weird speech from Johnny Depp as …
Hunter S. Thompson's well-thumbed war stories or fish stories from the drug culture have licensed director Terry Gilliam, a late replacement for the original director, Alex Cox, to shovel together a junkpile of repulsive visual effects in illustration of assorted altered states (distorting lenses, off-balance cameras, computer animation, gaudy lights, …
Academic exercise, adapted from an unrenowned theater piece entitled The Man Who Was Peter Pan, that purports to show how the playwright J.M. Barrie sculpted the glazed statue of Peter Pan from the soft clay of his real-life relationship with a widow and her four boys. (Albeit a platonic relationship, …
A savage journey into the heart of the artist's dream to change the world by making his mark. Savage in part because of its subject: Ralph Steadman, the pen behind the twisted, spattered portraits that served to illustrate Hunter S. Thompson's immersive gonzo journalism. But the real bite comes from …
An earth-shaking — or shaky, anyway — hypothesis as to the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. It issues not from hell, exactly, but merely from a "graphic novel" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. The Hughes brothers' adaptation, taking its cue, is extremely graphic, in addition to gruesome, …
Place your bets: 1000 to 1 says Gordon Chan's 16th Century pirate picture from Hong Kong out swashbuckles Johnny Depp's latest turn as Jack Sparrow? Venerable Hong Kong action star Sammo Hung stars.
The truth-bending journalist, doper, drinker, gun enthusiast, and suicide (1939-2005), in words and pictures, the latter ranging from a fuzzy video of the TV game show, To Tell the Truth, to big-screen impersonations of him in Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the former …
Consider-the-possibilities marital comedy written and directed by Yvan Attal, revolving around three car salesmen in contrasting marital states, and achieving a quality of genuine discourse. Tender moment: Attal, who also plays one of the three salesmen, gazing at his wife's neck as Elvis sings of how he can't help falling …
A Terry Gilliam exercise in excess, as dense, as heavy, as torpifying as a Christmas fruitcake. (Or as Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm.) The muffled narrative, revolving around an immortal travelling showman, his magic-mirror portal to the realm of imagination, and his deal with the Devil, …
Steven Sondheim's musical theater meditation on the complication, compromise, and carnality that adulthood brings to the fairy-tale world of children's fairy tales, gently Disneyfied for younger audiences eager to sing along. (Don't fret when Johnny Depp's leering Big Bad Wolf lifts his leg to block Little Red Riding Hood's progress; …
Jeanne Vaubernier (Maïwenn) is a working-class woman determined to climb the social ladder, using her charms to escape her impoverished life. Her lover, the Comte du Barry (Melvil Poupaud), wishes to present her to King Louis XV (Johnny Depp) and orchestrates a meeting through the influential Duke of Richelieu (Pierre …
Restoration period piece. Charles II of England (John Malkovich in a false nose) beseeches the Second Earl of Rochester (a rock-starry Johnny Depp) to quit wasting his energies on debauchery and to put them into becoming the king's Shakespeare: "Give me a major work of literature." What the sovereign is …