A wooden Indian come to life, a carnivorous slime creature in a mountain lake, a Living Dead hitchhiker -- a trio of terrible tales of terror from Stephen King. Someone throws up in each of the first two, and there are inexplicable allusions to the Cisco Kid in each of …
Incommunicative, nonverbal avant-gardism from New York artist Matthew Barney, with a madness-inducing "music" track and a great deal of tumid wide-angle imagery. It's actually the fifth of the Cremaster "cycle," numbered unchronologically, and by far the longest at three hours.
A disturbing juxtaposition of childhood and death. Carlos Saura's claustrophobic chamber piece adopts the point of view of its nine-year-old heroine (the heartbreakingly somber Ana Torrent, from Spirit of the Beehive), whose intimate acquaintance with death is highly colored by fantasy, ignorance, and innate cold-bloodedness. She, despite being thoroughly captivated …
Not without its impressive points (the decayed parchment-gray of Harriet Andersson's skin and the grunting exertion of her performance), Bergman's film about three sisters and their excruciating memories is nonetheless one of his shallowest. The characters make unproven declarations that they are in a dream or in misery or in …
Carlos Carrera's modernization, and Mexicanization, of a 19th-century Portuguese novel by Eça de Queiroz, a disciple of Flaubert. The film was a box-office bonanza in its native land, perhaps surprising in view of the sedateness and sobriety with which it looks at its subject. The subject on the other hand …
Spanish-language black comedy, a classification which would still today raise the specter of Luis Buñuel, even without the specific sight of the mannequin in the furnace. (See The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, from the master's Mexican period.) Director Alex de la Iglesia, like other followers in those …
Intelligent (and passionate) B-movie about a San Francisco career gal who gives it all up to marry an L.A. cop, and then redirects her ambitions onto her hubby's career: Little Lady Macbeth. The script by Jo Eisinger is propelled by feminist concerns, but without any stultifying dogma or fawning wish-fulfillment. …
Woody Allen's serio-tragi-quasi-semi-comedy switches between two concurrent plotlines, one about an eminent ophthalmologist with romantic problems (for one, horrible, heart-stopping moment, when the opening awards dinner is interrupted by flashback, we fear that this could turn into a knockoff of Bergman's Wild Strawberries), the other about an obscure documentary filmmaker …
Not since Mae West has there been a script so ravenous for the salty line, albeit at a level of wit quite out of sight of that other -- and not out of sight above it. ("I never forget a face, especially when I've sat on it"; "You're the head …
Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek, who don't have much in the way of family resemblance, are three Southern weird sisters (to risk a redundancy), rather like the heroines of three disparate Tennessee Williams plays assembled for a sitcom pilot. Keaton is an aging virgin afflicted with a "shrunken …
American remake of the imitation-American caper film from Argentina, Nine Queens. No real inspiration, but no desecration, either. Doing it in English has the principal effect of making it sound more like Mamet. John C. Reilly, in specific, sounds like Joe Mantegna: close your eyes and see. With Diego Luna, …
Hot-shot lawyer with a Fifties rock-and-roller's pompadour starts to have twinges of conscience when an acquitted rapist-murderer taunts him with a fresh mutilated corpse. A moral dilemma thrashed out in frenzied action and frosty light. Two ludicrous performances by Gary Oldman and Kevin Bacon, who don't seem to have settled …
Luis Buñuel's black comedy about a would-be ladykiller (a literal killer of ladies, that is). The sum of the parts, as they say, is greater than the whole -- for that matter greater than most other wholes as well. Memorable preludial scene, planted squarely on that common ground occupied by …
Fractured fairy tale (to borrow a phrase from Rocky and His Friends): Hansel and Gretel recast as a French Bonnie and Clyde (he's impotent) who lose their way in the woods after burying a body, and fall into the clutches of a hirsute homosexual hermit. (Because they're French, the young …