A different and diffident sort of movie comedy, which takes up the limited-interest subject of a Boston underground newspaper, why it lost its aim in the post-Nixon Seventies, and how it finishes the good fight not with a bang, but with a whimper. The style is realistic caricature, and it …
A cantor (Jason Schwartzman) in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher (Carol Kane) re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. Directed by Nathan Silver, starring Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane.
Famed author Marianne Winckler (Juliette Binoche) goes undercover to investigate the exploitation of the working class in Northern France. She eventually lands a job as a cleaner on the cross-channel ferry and develops close connections with the other cleaning women, many of whom have extremely limited resources and income opportunities. …
Romantic comedy about a young couple and their fear that tying the knot will put the kibosh on their Bohemian lifestyle. You need a movie to tell you this?
Familial trials and tribulations. Noteworthy moment from the trailer: wife gets fed up with husband's crumbs in bed, begins to vacuum them up, accidentally vacuums husband's HELLO.
Another cast of characters (but not cast of actors) rounded up in TV re-run heaven (or the Other Place) and brought back to life. Why? To what purpose? For whom? The how of it offers no clue. Dialogue excerpt: "What's smog?" And after a pause for the "Final Jeopardy" melody: …
The consuming ambition of this movie, whatever else it might be up to, is to pass off Eddie Murphy as a black Clint Eastwood. The Dirty Harry series comes first to mind, propelled there by the plainclothesman's independent ways, his catastrophic results, and his snippiness to his superiors in the …
Any mote of urban grit in the forerunner, or anyway in the opening credits sequence of the forerunner, has been neatly whisked away by Kleenex. And since the brash Detroit detective (Eddie Murphy) has already made the acquaintance of Frick and Frack on the Beverly Hills police force (Judge Reinhold, …
Grind-it-out sequel: just something to keep Eddie Murphy busy. The opening action sequence is well assembled, though it sets up a pattern of schizoid alternation between comedy and drama that persists throughout: immediately after the hero's boss expires in his lap, we plunge onward to airbag gags in the ensuing …
A shipwrecked foundling raised by ninjas grows up to be tubby Chris Farley. Whence commences a steady barrage of clumsy-loud-stupid jokes: jokes, that is, about clumsiness, loudness, and stupidity, clumsily, loudly, stupidly told. With Nicollette Sheridan, Chris Rock; directed by Dennis Dugan.
The enlistment of Nora Ephron, director and (with her sister Delia) cowriter, assures a level of smartness unexpected in a transplant from the small screen to the big. Not at all a reasonable facsimile of the Sixties sitcom about the witchy housewife with the twitchy nose, it is rather a …
Sanctimonious slush surrounding a dedicated doctor and an uncommitted wife (somebody else's) who make a deep connection while fighting famine in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya. The high ideals amount to no more than emotional blackmail. With Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo, Noah Emmerich; directed by Martin Campbell.
Documentary about rethinking school that asks, "What if kids directed their own learning?"
John Boorman has long shown a fine eye in concert with an unfine mind. And even in so half-hearted and half-baked an effort as this one, the wide, deep, full, lush, colorful, teeming, sudoriferous images form an impressive parade. But the typical disparity between eye and mind in a Boorman …