Caringly acted, expensively produced, and bottomlessly empty suspense movie, wherein the Antichrist, just reaching puberty and entering the military academy, is watched over by a bad fairy -- or fairy devilfather, if you will -- in the form of a pesky crow who prefers to be photographed in profile and …
Although the story comes from a certified science-fiction author, Roger Zelazny, and has been adapted by a couple of good hands, Alan Sharp and Lukas Heller, this post-WWIII adventure is a virtually unplotted sightseeing tour through stereotyped nuclear wastelands (i.e., the serviceable Southwest desert, covered over by Kool Aid skies). …
Visconti's horrendous dredging up of the Nazi nightmare begins inside a blast furnace, and for nearly three hours thereafter, his vision of human depravity rages like a fever. It's open to question whether Visconti was very interested in Naziism as a historical fact, or whether he was merely interested in …
Oddly focussed docudrama, riddled with capriciously off-balance compositions, on a disastrous interlude in the illustrious career of English football manager Brian Clough, his runaway ambition and runaway confidence in his rivalry with fellow manager Don Revie ("I wouldn't say I'm the top manager in the country, but I'm in the …
A groundbreaking "dark" musical by Danish director Lars von Trier -- groundbreaking, anyway, if you have forgotten about, or never knew about, The Threepenny Opera, Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, Carmen Jones, West Side Story, Oliver, Sweet Charity, Catch My Soul, Pennies from Heaven, One from the Heart, Newsies, Demy's …
Paceless, listless political thriller about a terrorist insurrection in an unnamed Latin American country that seems as though it must be Argentina. (Note the Calle Peron street sign.) Javier Bardem gives it some backbone as the honest-cop hero, humble, grave, apprehensive, all too human. With Laura Morante; directed by John …
Kevin Costner's three-hour-and-one-minute Western, his first directorial effort, readily brings to mind Sam Fuller's Run of the Arrow, which likewise tells of a Civil War veteran -- more interestingly, a die-hard Confederate -- who attempts to find a new home, a new nation, among the Sioux. There are several points …
True story of The Last Woman to Be Hanged in England, a "nightclub hostess" (read "tart") named Ruth Ellis, who shot her high-born lover in the mid-1950s. Although the sympathies of the filmmakers are quite certainly anti-capital punishment and pro-feminist (the screenwriter is Shelagh Delaney of A Taste of Honey, …
Stodgy stage play (by Brian Friel) about five spinster sisters in County Donegal in the depressed Thirties, and their addled older brother fresh from missionary service in Uganda. There is a lot of talk about dancing, Africa, paganism in general, and about getting away. Some of them eventually do. (Get …
The Happy Hooker Meets Torquemada. And Fanny Hill rompishness bows to Joan of Arc righteousness. It's Venice, toward the end of the 16th Century, and the only way for a common girl to get ahead is to learn the womanly art of downing a banana in one gulp. (Sure beats …
Dull title. Duller movie. And that's despite a vocabulary that gravitates toward "rat-fuckin' cocksucker" and "fuckin' cunt motherfucker," and despite a Cassavetes aesthetic of raw raging emotion photographed in a closeup cinéma-verité style. Abel Ferrera, the director, would appear to be one of those eternal sophomores (or eternal Henry Millers) …
Ice Cube, a Bay Area teacher, returns to his roots in South Africa, only to land in a rubbish pile of carjackers, racist thugs, dope peddlers. Elizabeth Hurley, the Estée Lauder girl, turns up as a crackhead stripper: "I like dahncing." Neither has much of a grasp of the job …
A full recital of misgivings about the casting would run the risk of descending to John Simon-esque rudeness. Let it suffice that John Malkovich is not altogether persuasive in the part of an infamous and irresistible roué that Michelle Pfeiffer is only slightly more persuasive as the demure embodiment of …
Catholic-school hellions in the 1970s. Peter Care's handling of alienated youth falls somewhere between Larry Clark and John Hughes, though it's not a fixed position: there's an uncertainty of tone and intent. Todd McFarlane's animated sequences, bringing the kids' superhero fantasies to fruition, tend toward flattery, but the performances of …