The daughter of deaf parents finds her way in the world as a clarinettist, in the footsteps of a glamorous, childless, possessive aunt. Schmaltzy but well shy of nauseating. The details of family life (the daughter sitting at the foot of the TV, translating an old movie into sign language …
Interlocked and overlapping stories, joined together through the roamings of a ruminative film director: "I only discovered reality when I began photographing it." (The actor in the part, John Malkovich, can make a hello sound like a difficult thought.) A tensionless collaboration between two compatible Gloomy Gusses, the infirm eighty-something …
The sequel craze of the Seventies has here reached the point of certifiability: this movie has nothing whatever to do with the original Beyond the Door, but for marketing reasons it is smarter to pretend otherwise. Cult director Mario Bava, an unpretentious surrealist, creates a nasty atmosphere with a haunted …
Let’s hope Hasbro doesn’t get their hands on this concept. Estranged brothers come across the ancient titular video board game while dissolving their long-absent father’s video store, and its discovery helps to explain the old man’s disappearance while unlocking a few demons of its own. The opening credit swing through …
Director Cristian Mungiu follows up his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days with a harrowing, unsentimental, but hugely sympathetic story of a tiny religious community's attempt to care for a damaged soul who comes into their midst. Voichita and Alina are young women who clung to one another …
There is no such thing as a bad genre, just filmmakers quick to yolk science fiction with horror before proceeding to add an appreciable amount of gore that covers for their innate inability to tell a story without the special effects vital to keeping impressionable minds coming back for more. …
It's an auspicious opening: a little girl — English, half-black, desperate to please — steps onto an obscure talent show stage and sings Nina Simone's "Blackbird": Why you wanna fly, blackbird? You ain't ever gonna fly. She comes in second, and her equally desperate mother (Minnie Driver) makes her trash …
The cast of characters includes a whisky-sodden British diplomat, an ex-prostitute Indian wife, an ex-seminarian Paraguayan rebel, an apolitical, amoral doctor with allegiances to all of the above, an implacable South American policeman -- well, it's Graham Greene, you see. The Honorary Consul, to be precise. The abbreviated TV style …
Further lengthening an already lengthy rut, Robert Altman again takes his source material, if not exactly his "inspiration," from a theater piece, in this case Christopher Durang's comedy about a match made through the Personals of New York Magazine. And then he brings to it that same offhanded style, that …
Vanity film from Kevin Spacey, directing himself in the part of pop star Bobby Darin in a free-form, fantasy-riddled biopic, throwing in a gratuitious impression of Jerry Lewis in the bargain (not bad), and doing his own singing in a mellower, droopier, croonier style possibly more suited to a biography …
Russ Meyer's supreme -- or maybe just extreme -- achievement in high spirits and low morals, having to do with an all-girl rock-and-roll group (The Carrie Nations) travelling to Hollywood and falling into wayward, wicked, and weird ways. The whirlwind tour of Tinsel Town and the finger-snapping, bus-rocking, cross-country trip …
A look at the lengths people will go to gain freedom, following various individuals as they attempt to flee North Korea, one of the most oppressive places on Earth, a land they grew up believing was a paradise. At the film’s core are a mother desperate to reunite with the …
Whether or not you are a fan of fart jokes, you will almost certainly feel something during the protracted run-up and almost equally protracted execution of the one that director Steven Spielberg delivers in his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved story of a runty giant who seeks to atone for …
What's more frightening? Imprisonment in a haunted house or being interrogated by law enforcement agents investigating a politician they suspect of corruption. This Indian horror film has the answer.