The shady S&M club’s one-year, no-cancellation contract prohibits subs from initiating activity and insists that an element of surprise be maintained: members never know exactly where or when the bondage babes will appear to administer a thrashing. Within five minutes of establishing the rules, director (and one-fifth of the writing …
A shaggy dog story about a nearly hairless cat in 1920s Algiers. He serves his master the rabbi, but he loves his mistress, the rabbi’s fleshy daughter. When he eats the family parrot and so gains the power of speech, he seizes the opportunity to begin pitching woo. The rabbi …
How The Other Half Grieves — the other half being rich, beautiful, and above and beyond the dubious comforts of group therapy for parents who have lost a child. (Well, maybe not “beautiful” — unless you find Nicole Kidman’s shift from China Doll to Sinewy Skeleton transporting.) Moments of exquisite …
Factual folk tale of three little half-caste girls who in the early 1930s, by authority of the Aborigines Act, were taken from their home and transported 1200 miles away to an "assimilation" camp, whence they promptly escaped and set out homeward on foot, using the titular structure — "the longest …
Joan Rivers's directorial debut, a situation comedy whose untenable situation centers around the world's first pregnant man. Rivers, herself a mother, surrounds the two birth scenes with unexpectedly reverent invocations of God and Country. Most of the time, though, her cinematic style closely copies the breathless, blurting delivery of her …
David Cronenberg follows They Came from Within with more of the same: the same venereal-disease plot development, the same nauseating special effects by Joe Blasco, the same plasticky color that makes an actor's skin look like that of a rubber doll, and the same scattered satirical touches. The incomprehensible premise …
The son of an ordinary woman living in Bremen, Germany is accused of terrorism and shipped off to Guantanamo. As the mom battles for his release, she sets off on a journey that takes her all the way to the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. Cologne-based comedienne Meltem Kaptan stars …
Stephen Hopkins’ account of track and field legend Jesse Owens and the controversy surrounding US participation in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 is overstuffed, muddy-headed, heavy-handed, derivative, and weirdly sanitized — and yet it almost works, because who wouldn’t thrill to see a black man take on Nazi ideology on …
Disney revisits the titular summit, thirty years later, but not to pick up the paranormal adolescents in middle age. (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, the original kids of Escape from… and Return to…, can be spotted in bit parts.) The action is ineptly directed by Andy Fickman, and Dwayne “The …
The abrupt, give-up ending almost makes nonsense, or at least futility, of everything that has preceded it: an unpretentious chase thriller that begins in low gear when a quartet of vacationers spy accidentally on a devil-worship ceremony and have their vacation spoiled forever after. It's a good advertisement for the …