Based on the diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, structured as a series of monologues, the film follows a long-term relationship between a man and a woman. Directed by 92-year-old documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman (his first fictional film), starring Nathalie Boutefeu as the wife of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.
Howard Ratner’s (Adam Sandler) day is consumed with robbing Peter to pawn to Paul. His life is a constant juggling act, his desperate ploy a complex series of bets involving a multitude of moving parts. If he can distract his clients long enough to keep afloat everything, the rewards could …
Zombies in Australia, not too different from zombies in Pennsylvania, but spoofier. Low-low-budget and low-low-brow. Photographed all in blue, violet, lavender. With Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins, and Lisa Cunningham; written, directed, produced, and edited by the Spierig brothers, Peter and Michael.
Not the Sarah Palin documentary, nor the John Wayne Western. In this documentary, coach Bill Courtney turns around a high school football team in North Memphis, Tennessee. He is a remarkable man, not a plaster hero. The struggle to make the school’s first playoff in 110 years becomes less involving …
Surf Iceland! It must have sounded good on paper, particularly before the team confronted the worst storm to hit Iceland’s shores in 25 years.
In Australia, to be more precise, and during the 1800s. A Gothic costume drama from Hitchcock's dull, late-Forties period, just after The Paradine Case and Rope and just before Stage Fright, with long takes and long talks and an interesting Ingrid Bergman.
Outmoded spy comedy about a husband-and-wife secret-agent team, and mutual-admiration society, who offhandedly dispatch thugs and terrorists in between wisecracks and parental duties (a bouncing baby girl named either Jane Louise or Louise Jane -- they haven't made up their minds). They are so pleased with themselves they're unlikely to …
Always amiable, sometimes actually amusing blaxploitation spoof, more explicitly a Jim Kelly spoof, directed by Malcolm (cousin of Spike) Lee, in a suitably sleazy style. The free-lance hero (Eddie Griffin, practically licking his chops), an atavistic Seventies superdude sporting a 'fro the radius of a medicine ball, but a master …
Roy Boulting, writer-director, brings some sniggering double-entendres and a general ooh-la-la outlook to this WWII farce located in an internationally renowned Paris brothel. But he shuffles the brunt of the responsibility onto Peter Sellers, who comes up with some amusing vocal inflections and behavioral tics, but who hardly gives any …
"I don't take sides; I take pictures." So says the self-interested photojournalist on assignment in Nicaragua in 1979. And he is true to his word, too, at least until he changes his mind: "I think I finally saw one too many bodies." And then, in the face of countless black …
Contemporization, and commonization, of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. The two youthy riffraffy Seattle fortune-hunters, Cynthia and Buck, who get high on cough syrup and say things like "Chill out," do their share to lower the proceedings. But it is impossible not to retain some interest as long …
Another eruption of neo-noir. Maybe not quite so "neo-" when you notice it's a remake of a Golden Age noir. But at the same time, and for the same reason, all the more noir. The original, Criss Cross (1948), was directed by Robert Siodmak, not just generically Germanic but genuinely …
Doctors and patients dispense education on the epidemic of tick-borne Lyme disease. Education, and dread. Controversies over diagnosis and treatment, plus the politics and economics of health care, cloud the picture. That doesn’t inhibit filmmaker Andy Abrahams Wilson from manipulating emotion, mainly musically.