An important thing to remember for the less attentive follower of the French cinema is that Luc Besson (the director of this English-language production) is not Luc Beraud. The second of these Lucs made a quite good little film called Like a Turtle on Its Back. The first one made …
Ryuta and Mineo Komatsu are brothers, both yakuza (gangsters). Mineo, although complicit in crime, even murder, wants out of the gangster life, hoping to become a successful singer instead. Ryuta loves his brother, but Mineo's possible defection presents problems for the gang, and Ryuta realizes he must kill his brother …
Anemic remake of an underrated adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. What was, in 1969, a sort of neo-James Cain hard-boiled thriller is now, under the direction of George Armitage (Miami Blues, Grosse Pointe Blank), a post-Tarantino, post-Get Shorty smarty-pants romp. And there is nothing to replace the sexual sparks …
Donnie Yen returns to high school as a teacher trying reach to a class of poor students, while dealing with a greedy entrepreneur and his gang of fighters as well as the government.
The gimmick of mismatched twins separated at birth: if it was funny before (Start the Revolution without Me), perhaps lightning could strike again. Or if not a bull's-eye, at least somewhere on the target, say about the first ring from the outermost. That would be, and is, not bad at …
Much the same premise as Mary McCarthy's (or Sidney Lumet's) The Group: a circle of political idealists in their college days are reunited years later for the first funeral within the circle. But it is treated more in the form of The Return of the Secaucus Seven, a long shapeless …
Much the same premise as Mary McCarthy's (or Sidney Lumet's) The Group: a circle of political idealists in their college days are reunited years later for the first funeral within the circle. But it is treated more in the form of The Return of the Secaucus Seven, a long shapeless …
Middle-class problem picture. The problem is that of the working wife (door-to-door peddler of sewing machines), and it has, in contemporary India, two sides to it: the economic necessity and the social stigma. Satyajit Ray, no mossback he, lightens the problem, but doesn't diminish it, with an uncommonly high amount …
Near-perfect murder mystery, from a novel by the poet Kenneth Fearing, about a Big Town crime reporter, overdue for vacation, following a killer's trail that seems to lead straight to himself. Classically compressed in time and space (two of the three "unities"), and the action (the third) is ushered along …
Well-turned genre piece, lean, tight, minimalist, photographed by John Alton with such an eye for black-and-white abstraction as to provide the perfect specimen in the Evolution of Expressionism circa the mid-1950s. Jean Wallace contributes some smoldering sexuality as the gun moll, and Cornel Wilde (Wallace's long-time husband in real life) …
Adam Sandler adopts a five-year-old in order to appear mature by comparison and impress his girlfriend. It doesn't work: neither the impressing nor the appearing mature. Lovers of peepee jokes are requested to love him anyway. With Joey Lauren Adams, Leslie Mann, Jon Stewart, Rob Schneider, Steve Buscemi; directed by …
Italian spoof of the Rififi-type caper film, and enough of an archetype in its own right to win a lot of tolerance for director Mario Monicelli throughout his prolific career. The buildup achieves a genial sense of proletarian oneness, though no eruptive laughs. Those are reserved for the climactic caper: …
Strictly routine case of police corruption, with dashes of Cajun flavoring around New Orleans, and a mildly spicy sex scene ("Stop that," the woman protests, in reference to the man's out-of-frame hand. "That?" he leers. "Or that?"). Its most distinctive feature, however, is its attitude of Old World (or Man's …
Overlong, oversweet romantic comedy on the homosexual passions coursing through a culturally diverse, tolerant, tight-knit Montana paradise ("Can't you see what a good job God did here?"): the successful New York artist returned home to tend his ailing grandfather; the ex-jock Adonis for whom he has carried a torch since …
What could Tim Burton have possibly seen in the story of a monotonous, marginally talented, yet enormously successful “artist"? Something of himself, perhaps? Another one of the director’s triumphs of production design over storytelling, as structurally spiritless as the ocular-enhanced, Children of the Damned urchins generally associated with the paintings …