First-time feature filmmaker Alan Taylor puts a benign face on urban crime. The Pink Pantherish opening theme sets the tone for three Jersey jerk-offs (William Forsythe, Vincent Gallo, Adam Trese) to break-and-enter into a bakery when their proposed target was the next-door jewelry store. (One of them is satisfied to …
Joe Berlinger's and Bruce Sinofsky's crime documentary, originally made for HBO, chronicles the two trials of three teenage Metallica fans accused of the murder and mutilation of three grade-schoolers in West Memphis, Arkansas. The associated specters of witchcraft, devil worship, Aleister Crowley, and human sacrifice are raised. Doubts get cast. …
Title notwithstanding, the scope is broadly biographical, not narrowly judicial, with the protagonist's character set in concrete as a moonshine-peddling urchin in rural Kentucky ("You can't be so ornery. People'll think you're crazy!" "Naw, I'm just trying to make an honest buck"). Jump forward to the Hustler Go-Go Club in …
Throwback to Saturday-matinee cliffhangers circa 1938, the exact date of the battle over the Skull of Touganda between the Sengh Brotherhood and the Ghost Who Walks. A little insipid in its kiddieness and kiddingness, but pleasantly unpretentious in scale. Perhaps, on second thoughts, a throwback only to The Rocketeer or, …
A strange light comes down from the sky on the night of his thirty-seventh birthday, and a small-town garage owner wakes up the next morning as a genius, reading two or three books a day ("at least"), moving objects telekinetically, foreseeing an earthquake, etc. What was that light? -- a …
This got a lot of attention, to say nothing of a distribution deal, for the prize-winning performance at the Venice Film Festival of its four-year-old star, Victoire Thivisol. Anyone, needless to say, would have to be pretty hardhearted not to be touched by the spectacle of a crying little girl …
When Henry James created Isabel Archer, one of his American innocents abroad, he had plenty of good reason to feel, as he recalled in his preface to a later edition of the novel, that he was venturing into virgin territory (well ahead of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, et al.) in …
Penny Marshall transplants the half-century-old The Bishop's Wife into the present-day black community, but not in quest of greater and grittier social relevance. A dapper angel in pearl gray, name of Dudley ("Don't call me Dud"), comes down to Earth in answer to the prayers of a beleaguered ghetto clergyman, …
Publicity-hound attorney volunteers for the unpopular cause of the media-christened "Butcher Boy," a soft-spoken Kentucky hick charged with hacking up the archbishop. The viewer's concern, as events develop, is not so much with unprincipled, anything-for-a-win attorneys as it is with unprincipled, anything-for-a-win filmmakers. (The always reliable Frances McDormand stays unsullied …
Civil war in the post-U.S.S.R. Two Russian POWs, a veteran and a rookie, come to know one another and their Muslim captors. Elementary and tiresome sermon, from a nonpartisan point of view, on war's cost to humanity; authentic Causasus locales, clothes, faces. With Oleg Menshikov and Sergei Bodrov, Jr.; directed …
An almost too real Belgian film by the brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, a coming-of-age tale centered around the dutiful adolescent son of a Liège slumlord who furnishes substandard housing for illegal immigrants who can't complain. The boy's discovery of a sense of morality without any adult guidance is unforeseeably …
Full-throttle kidnapping thriller, with sufficiently neck-wrenching zigs and zags. The pivotal zig (or zag) is the underdiscussed decision to turn the two-million-dollar ransom into a two-million-dollar reward: a tempting carrot for the criminal turncoat. Mel Gibson, perhaps setting his sights on the Best Actor Oscar after salting away the Best …
High-toned costume drama, set in the viperish milieu of the pre-revolutionary Versailles court, where the emphasis is at least as much on verbal display as on sartorial. (The ingénue who disdains the life of the court, by contrast, demonstrates her open-heartedness through her décolletage.) The drama, though, is diminished by …
This film is dedicated in loving memory to Don Simpson -- the last in his line of collaborations with co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide, Bad Boys, et al.) before his drug-related demise. A fitting monument, it goes about as far as a narrative film can …
Postmodern nightmare of Hawaiian sports shirts, pyrotechnical displays, hallucinogenic drugs, exotic fish (our star-crossed lovers first lay eyes on each other from opposites sides of the aquarium), underwater kisses, wedding music by Prince, the Crypt of a Thousand Candles, and a bag-of-tricks cinematic technique. Shake-and-bake-speare, let's call it. The setting …