A light snooze through the subjects of race, crime, politics, and jazz in said city -- hometown of director Robert Altman -- in the mid-Thirties. To summarize it in such terms is to make it sound more ambitious than it honestly is. The period re-creation -- the array of automobiles, …
Helping a stranger change a flat tire results in a summer job at a racetrack for Charley (Charlie Plummer) in this well made but seriously downbeat tale of a teenager who learns the hard way that quarter horses and housepets don’t mix. (And those looking to pursue a career at …
The follies of low-budget independent filmmaking, broken down into three separate chapters. The first two turn out to be dreams, of the director and the leading lady respectively, and the third depicts the actual shooting of a dream. Paradoxically, the first two have a firmer grip on hard realities -- …
Three months from the finish of his tour of duty, a wounded Iraq War vet gets assigned on the home front to the Casualty Notification Team, a recipe for overacting. A muted Samantha Morton almost alone avoids the pitfall. With Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Jena Malone, and Steve Buscemi; directed …
Computer-animated kiddie horror show lowers its sights to an illusion of Claymation. The human figures are awfully stiff, but the space around them is wonderfully plastic and elastic (the fall of an autumn leaf, first thing in the movie, gives you a dizzying idea of what's in store), and the …
Plump and rubbery computer animation prefaced by a refreshingly retro (ca. 1960) two-dimensional title sequence. Safely recommendable to any child up to the age of five, and less safely as his age increases. The whole premise of a parallel universe of monsters making nightly forays into our own universe, bottling …
Steven Brill's update of the Depression-period Capra-Cooper antique, populism and preachiness intact, is an above-average Adam Sandler comedy, about a sweet-natured rube who inherits a bundle. (Forty billion, for inflation.) The average is raised in large part by the rest of the batting order, Peter Gallagher, Erick Avari (the one …
Good news? Parkinson’s claims the life of Nancy’s (Andrea Riseborough) repugnantly overweening mother (Ann Dowd). (Writer/director Christina Choe‘s maiden feature begins in the 4x3 ratio; with mom out of the picture the frame expands to 16x9 to symbolically afford Nancy a little more breath-ing room.) Bad news? Nancy’s talked a …
Small, tidy, independent first film by Bill Sherwood, on gay life in New York City, and in a rather arty and intellectual circle to boot. Michael, a would-be writer and reluctant editor, has a thriving relationship with Robert (tickling one another's ribs, fencing with umbrellas). But Robert has arranged a …
Built like a bullet, yet with his mind a cage of wormy lust, greed, and bigotry, cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is far below the LAPD’s finest. Oren Moverman directed as if fiercely merging Colors and Bad Lieutenant, while chief writer James Ellroy overplays his slumming zeal for lowlife crud. …
The quest for True Love in the superficial and illusional worlds of fashion photography and soap opera. The cast is large and diverse, and there are some committed performances, especially from Matthew Modine and that diva of the American independent cinema, Catherine Keener. But the comic material is mostly commonplace …
The directorial (also auctorial) debut of Quentin Tarantino, a past actor with a small part here. (Initial impression of him: a bit of a showoff.) In its essentials, it's a conventional heist movie, and there is not a lot more to it than essentials: an ad hoc gang of jewel …
John Turturro, in his director's hat, dips into lip-sync musical fantasy in the proletarian mode of Pennies from Heaven (or the more rarefied and bourgeois Same Old Song of Alain Resnais), with minor modifications: the people engage in raunchier talk, and instead of simply mouthing the words to old pop …
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, …
The surprise success of the first Spy Kids has meant more money for the followup, more computer animation in particular. More money, more mess. Steve Buscemi ("I'm no loon") shows up too late and too little to save the day. With Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Antonio Banderas, and Carla Gugino; …