Rita, a wilful and unruly teenager, is on the verge of womanhood. Her sexual awakening leads her to intimacy with a schoolboy, too young, and a bus driver, too old. Rita’s efforts to break out of her solitude and claustrophobic environment isolate her even more, until one day she crosses …
The con man and the college girl: a mad-love story of masochism and self-destruction and "inconsistent" characters. Flamboyantly played by Adrien Brody (especially alongside the frugality of his partner in crime, Jon Seda) and gamely by Charlotte Ayanna. Directed by Peter Sehr.
Balky adaptation of a Nabokov novel, set in Italy entre les guerres, about an antisocial chess master whose head is turned by a pretty socialite on the eve of the World Championship. John Turturro seems just the right man for the job, had he been given anything to work with. …
Unimaginative, undistinctive retitling of Joan the Mad, a tale of passion, infidelity, jealousy, madness, death. A tawdry and commonplace tale, in other words, elevated on the high heels of history and nobility: Princess Joan of Castile and Philip the Handsome of Flanders, ca. 1500. Well-produced, which is to say well-costumed …
An apolitical blacklisted screenwriter (Jim Carrey, pining after the Oscar that got away) hits the road to nowhere, drives off a bridge into the river, knocks his head, and wakes up on the beach with amnesia, right outside a California town where he happens to be a dead ringer for …
The first Coen brothers film to disappoint. That's not to say it's not good, certainly not to say it's not even as good as their first, Blood Simple, when there could be no expectations and so no disappointment. The brothers have not suddenly lost their touch. They do for Billy …
Rob Morrow's directing debut, casting himself as a New York artist with Tourette's Syndrome, an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a major crush on the pregnant girlfriend of his oldest pal, an altruistic doctor ignorant of the pregnancy during his volunteer tour of duty in Burundi. Earnest effort, full of bad little …
Refrigerated Forties-style melodrama from French director Claude Chabrol (and from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong, original author also of Chabrol's excellent La Rupture). The gabby exposition takes a while to set up the situation: a chocolate heiress and a concert pianist, long-time friends and lovers, have elected to tie the …
Trifling crime comedy slash road movie which for some reason, out of the truckloads of scripts dumped at their individual doorsteps, captured the fancy of both Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. (Typical Roberts line, spoken to her abductor: "You know, you're a very sensitive person for a cold-blooded killer." Typical …
Before we get to the film's title, before we get to one of Hou Hsiao-hsien's patented group portraits in flux around a table, we are introduced to his heroine in a dreamy slow-motion single take, with the camera tagging along behind her, unable ever to catch up, as she strides …
Before we get to the film's title, before we get to one of Hou Hsiao-hsien's patented group portraits in flux around a table, we are introduced to his heroine in a dreamy slow-motion single take, with the camera tagging along behind her, unable ever to catch up, as she strides …
A cartoonist in a coma, whence he descends to dreamland along with his fictional creation, Monkeybone, a simian symbol of the id; or more simply, the phallus; more precisely, an erect one. Fitfully sophisticated; mostly tedious and ugly (the sets, the animation, Monkeybone in particular); very rarely and very mildly …
Swiss-born filmmaker Marc Forster focuses on the middle man (Billy Bob Thornton) in three generations of Georgia corrections officers. The film starts right out throwing haymakers -- first-thing-in-the-morning vomit, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am sodomy, good-ole-boy bigotry, Death Row, the Last Walk, more vomit, a suicide, and a hit-and-run fatality -- before it settles …