Patchy, raggedy "indie," based on short stories of A.M. Homes: back and forth between four neighboring middle-class families, your proverbial lives of quiet desperation. Despite the juicing-up (roadway tragedy, the threat of pedophilia, a young boy's intimate conversational relationship with a Barbie doll), it remains flat and drab. With Glenn …
"A Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventure," trumpet the opening credits. Those are of course two separate people, Clive Cussler being the original novelist, and Dirk Pitt (wham! bam!) being his swashbuckling hero, who, along with his comical sidekick Al Giordino, is hunting a treasure-laden Civil War ironclad up the Niger …
Dottily old-fashioned desert romance, set a year after Rudolph Valentino's death, when it would have been old-fashioned already. Brooke Shields, disguised in a mustache such as to make her look like Young Howard Hughes, molested and seduced by Arabs, terrorized by scorpions and large cats, cleansed in an oasis waterfall, …
Gautham Menon writes, directs, and produces, this action-romance movie. In Telugu.
Three generations of musicians, representing the past, present, and future of Vietnamese metal, are given their due in this probing, good-natured documentary from the talented team of Sean Lambe and William Snyder (Faces You Forget: Nights Out in Saigon). In light of the country’s war-worn past, it stands to reason …
Big screen TV.
Reissue of the 1993 Japanese animated film directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara and based on the popular Sailor Moon manga series written by Naoko Takeuchi.
Heavy-breathing translation of the Yukio Mishima novel, the key characters of which are a fatherless boy with an obsession about the sea, a handsome, multi-scarred sailor who forsakes the hardships of a seafarer's life for the cozy bed of the boy's mother, and a bullying schoolmate of the boy, a …
The father of a sick child takes on a criminal gang running a pharmaceutical racket. Written and directed by Dr. Sailesh Kolanu, starring Venkatesh Daggubati, Baby Ssara Palekar, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Arya, Shraddha Srinath, Ruhani Sharma, and Andrea Jeremiah.
In the line of Mission: Impossible, The Fugitive, The Untouchables, et al., another television series receives a steroid injection on the big screen. (TV's Simon Templar, Roger Moore, is invited to lend his voice to the radio announcer at the end.) Lots of movement, music, gadgetry, gigantic closeups, overhead shots, …
Bridget (screenwriter Kelly O’Sullivan) is a self-proclaimed agnostic feminist who’s not quite ready to be a mother, or much of anything else for that matter. Given her admitted aversion to responsibility, a snarky aside aimed at the religious art adorning her potential employers’ wall, and a pronounced eagerness to bail …
Peter Bogdanovich trespasses on Graham Greene territory, a story of life in exile, a wallow in waywardness, and an undoubted treat for the alienated and the sullied. The narrative exposition in general, and the badly recorded Orson Welles-ian dialogue in particular, is like slush, but the movie achieves a certain …
The feature debut of writer-director Hue Rhodes is a pack-following independent film caroming from oddball to oddball: a midget boss, a sunny secretary surrounding herself with yellow Smiley Faces, a wheelchair stripper, a gun-toting militant nudist, a sideshow human fireball, and so forth. It's nice, or it ought to be, …