Illuminating documentary, shot in suitably sooty black-and-white, about homeless squatters in a New York subway tunnel. (Shades of the cannibalistic Undergrounders in the cult British horror film, Raw Meat, a/k/a Death Line.) The sense of subterranean space and spatial relationships is a bit vague, but the camera is well at …
Several Chekhov stories blended together, with most of the delicacy that that name stands for ruthlessly expunged: aristocrats and bureaucrats of Eisensteinian exaggeration, musical peasants, a lovers' embrace in a blizzard of chicken feathers. Marcello Mastroianni, as a skirt-chaser in genuine love, behaves in that unbuttoned manner he tends to …
Stephen King's Jekyll-and-Hyde variation is as convoluted and garbled as we have come to expect. A college Lit. professor and writer of "serious fiction" is threatened with the exposure of his pulp-novelist pseudonym. Why on earth — given the heritage of Kenneth Fearing, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, et al. — …
Fashionably “dark” comic-book movie, the first one to think of putting the darkness right up in the title — a synonym, that, for “the bat man,” as he is frequently and unfamiliarly referred to, or simply Batman to you and me. Aside from the title, the second installment in Christopher …
Just another Batman, but with all due modesty. And beyond modesty, all due shame. (Modesty on the production level; shame on the level of the plot.) The demands of bloody revenge, it develops, have taken their toll on his inner self; and the Phantom-of-the-Opera scar tissue over three-quarters of his …
Nameless, malevolent forces dim the lights in an isolated country house, pilfer the colored pencils of the current residents' youngest child, and inflame the nervous condition of the man of the family. Prosaically scripted, pallidly photographed, frenetically edited thriller from Spanish filmmaker Jaume Balagueró, but spoken in English in a …
Not just the name of a movie, but the name of a New England town where Matilda the Tooth Fairy, hanged as a child-killer in the deep dark past, and now a fluttering flapping thing in a porcelain mask, still makes vengeful visits on the occasion of a resident's last, …
Life aboard a rocketship, twenty years in flight, looks pretty much like life in the college dorms, near the end of Winter Quarter, when boredom runs amok. These unbarbered astronauts all drift in wayward directions, dreaming of the summer surf, perusing a comic book called Falling in Love, or playing …
Yet another American remake of a Japanese horror film, but not, please, "just another." This atmospheric ghost story is more coherent, more cohesive, more cogent, than any Ring, any Grudge, any at all. It has a palpable theme, motherhood, and an evocative visual motif, water, and these have been worked …
If you had not already heard that the eponymous hero is an android, or that the rather unsyntactical acronym stands for Data Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform, you would have to wait a long time for this movie to assert itself as science fiction. Because the hero is a child, and …
A World War II submarine adventure of a sort that already seemed outdated as of, oh, twenty-five years previous — roughly the date of that sympathetic Hollywood portrait of the embittered, weary, but still cunning U-boat commander: The Enemy Below. The main idea of how to rise above the war-movie …
In the mode of Scary Movie, a witless collection of references to, thefts from, and spoofs of, assorted romantic comedies, nonromantic comedies, noncomedies, anything at all, My Big Fat Greek Wedding to Lord of the Rings. The assumption seems to be that mere recognition will bring forth laughter. With Alyson …
A hedged bet, marital comedy cum action thriller, with a “boring” New Jersey couple enlivening their stale marriage by getting themselves mistaken for high-stakes blackmailers. Tina Fey will never in her lifetime use up the eternal gratitude she earned for her role in the 2008 presidential campaign (the faux Palin), …
Your traditional Christmas-card angel (Emmanuelle Béart, the title character of Manon des Sources), bathed in white light, caressed by gentle breezes, and with the wings of a pterodactyl-sized dove, is marooned on Earth when one of the latter gets broken. Awwwww. (A couple of nontraditional touches: she speaks in the …
A memorial to the Gullah culture on the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast, set at a pivotal moment in 1902 on the eve of one family's emigration from the African sanctuary to the U.S. mainland. Plainly a labor of love for filmmaker Julie Dash, but a labor for the …