Warmly lit but thin and poky Brazilian comedy (based on fact) of a rustic ménage-à-quatre composed of an earth mother, her indolent new husband, and her two recruited lovers. (Not counting her children by each.) Commanding performance from Regina Casé, a sort of browner, plumper Frances McDormand. Sonia Braga she's …
Miss Ingratiation, for sure. Sandra Bullock (who produced, too) plays a one-of-the-guys FBI agent who goes undercover as a beauty contestant. The character howls in protest; it's the actress who worms and wheedles. Michael Caine has his moments as the gay Pygmalion who makes her over. So does William Shatner …
It was perhaps understandable, after the barbs from critics and stand-up comics alike over the plotline of the previous entry (not so much unfollowable as unswallowable), that the series might want to make a fresh start under another director: John Woo in place of the bilious Brian De Palma. It …
Brian De Palma in command of Mission Control -- and it is not a happy sight to see this alumnus of the New Hollywood circa 1969-75, this ape of Welles and Hitchcock, this former pet of Pauline Kael, hurl himself headlong into the maelstrom of special effects. The image of …
Not the first, but the most clinical, screen account of the ultimate case of épater les bourgeois: two servants (sisters and lesbian lovers) who slaughtered two of their employers in 1930s France. Unadorned (no-frills production, no music), unsensationalized, unflinching, and still unilluminating. Frighteningly intense performance, however, by Sylvie Testud as …
Flattery lavished on Madonna, the muscle-bound yoga instructor: "fantastic body," "great lay," etc., and she can even straighten out (so to speak) her gay best friend, one tipsy evening. Et voilà, a bun in the oven. The ensuing complications ("Daddy, are you a faggot?") are concerned more to be liberal …
It must have sounded like a promotional piece of cake: the director of Rosemary's Baby returning to the diocese of devil worship. But no one could accuse Roman Polanski of crass capitalization, much less crass capitalism. This is not an End of Days. It is an anti-End of Days, almost …
Neil LaBute wades into the mainstream, above the ankles, over the knees. He, as we learned from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, is a filmmaker uncommonly tough of mind and of hide. That toughness, along with that almost reptilian coldness, is patently of less use …
A road comedy, “based upon The Odyssey by Homer,” about three chain-gang fugitives in Depression-era Mississippi. (The title, should you need reminding, comes from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels: the proposed title for a “meaningful” film by a refractory Hollywood contract director, whose subsequent quest to get in touch with the …
Short film explores the oceanography of Baja California.
The first feature of Irish-born writer and director Myles Connell, a lean, quiet, slow, down-in-the-mouth heist thriller, Plot No. 1(b), the one about the ex-con who tries to go straight but gets detoured by bad company. (We lose some respect for his savvy, or for the writer-director's, when the ex-con …
French filmmaker Alain Berliner (Ma Vie en Rose) gets the chance to work with Demi Moore, in the English language, and in America, but also in France. In the setting of New York City, the actress is Marty, a strong-minded independent single woman and high-powered careerist, head of her own …
Revolutionary War epic, long-winded and simple-minded (an unhappy combination), as brutal in its sentimentality as in its violence. One exciting scene when the neutralist hero ("I'm a parent. I haven't got the luxury of principles") ambushes a squad of Redcoats bent on hanging his eldest son. The German-born director, Roland …
A thousand-points-of-light fable about a pensive seventh-grader in soulless Las Vegas, who takes his Social Studies assignment -- "Think of an idea to change our world, and put it into action!" -- takes it very seriously indeed, and initiates a grassroots movement that spreads like wildfire. His idea: do a …