Four struggling actors, plus an unsteady camera, repair to a remote Big Bear cabin for a weekend, to write themselves a film much like the one we’re watching: a shoestring relationship thing that develops into a thriller thing. For the four actors (Ross Partridge, Steve Zissis, Greta Gerwig, Elise Muller) …
Bangkok tedious, too. An introspective hit man (“I’d like to meet someone, but it’s tough when you live out of a suitcase”) trains a pickpocket as his successor, and moons over a beautiful mute pharmacist, on his last big job before retirement. The Pang Brothers’ English-language remake of their own …
“Based on a true story,” or anyway on a true bank job, the knockover of Lloyds Bank, Baker Street, London, 1971. The filmmakers, headed by the veteran Australian-born director Roger Donaldson and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, have taken advantage of the cloak of mystery that still surrounds …
French documentary for a highly select audience, film aficionados with an affection for the one-time New Waver, Agnes Varda, now a gnomish octogenarian: "I'm playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative." She travels the entire length of Memory Lane (a block or two of which …
Uncle Skeeter’s yarn-spinning collaborations with button-cute niece and nephew — tales of the Dark Ages, the Old West, Ancient Greece, Outer Space — are translated magically into reality the following day. Adam Sandler, rarely funny anyway, shoots for the more attainable goal of schmaltzy. With Keri Russell, Russell Brand, Guy …
Interracial, extramarital love in unsettled India of 1937. Things take a tragic turn fairly early, and then grind on taking melodramatic ones. Capably directed (as well as photographed) by Santosh Sivan, but heavy-handedly. With Linus Roache, Nandita Das, Rahul Bose, and Jennifer Ehle.
Twisted, tangled, snarled zaniness around a behind-the-times video store, facing foreclosure, in Passaic, N.J. An habitué of the place (Jack Black, at his most demonically possessed) unwittingly erases the entire stock after he becomes “magnetized” while attempting to sabotage the next-door power plant: “I didn’t sabotage the power plant; the …
Christopher Bell’s documentary on steroid use in the U.S., mainly in athletics, and candidly in his own family (brothers “Mad Dog” and “Smelly”). Not a polished or thorough presentation, but neither is it a pat, open-and-shut presentation. It is judiciously two-sided, with a hard look at the hypocrisies of the …
The embarrassments of having an ADD autistic brother when you’re trying to fit in at a new school: him running down the street in his undies and into a stranger’s house to use the toilet, him smearing poo on the rug, him popping your new girlfriend’s tampon into his mouth, …
Serious-minded science fiction, allegorical as you like, about an epidemic of “the white sickness,” a new form of sightlessness that plunges the sufferer into blinding light instead of traditional darkness. We experience this from the point of view, so to speak, of several dozen people left to their own devices …
The war on terrorism, or anyway a single battle against terrorism, conducted with slickness and razzmatazz, and time for romance too. Leonardo DiCaprio continues to breathe hard in his efforts to be an action hero; the steel-haired Russell Crowe, in a desk job, plays peekaboo around his glasses frames; both …
Antiwar agitation by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, centered around a young Missourian named Tomas Young, an Army vet paralyzed in Iraq, with an heroic supporting part for Robert Byrd (D.-W.Va.), seen in antebellum debate on the Senate floor and finally met in person. (Some remarkable effects are gotten from …
TV series superdog escapes from the backlot under the impression his powers are real. (Shades of The Truman Show.) Even the vast possibilities of computer animation can’t convince us of this particular possibility. Once the canine hero, about two-thirds of the way through, awakens to his limitations and discovers his …
Unpalatable promo for California wines, more broadly a paean to good old American know-how and a chance, at the same time, to stick it to the French, the British, the Old World. A competitive wine tasting in the Bicentennial year of 1976, boiled down as “a bunch of hicks taking …
Contrived concentration-camp fable, from the novel by John Boyne, about the budding friendship, through barbed wire, between the eight-year-old Aryan son of the camp commandant (in his innocence, he thinks it’s a farm) and a same-aged, shaved-headed Jew. It roughly recalls Life Is Beautiful in its mixture, or collision, of …