Neo-apartheid in South Africa: a million ghettoized extraterrestrials from a stalled spacecraft over Johannesburg. The documentary affectations, discontinued at convenience, make it seem initially a joke rather than a reality. And not a funny joke, either. The aliens — pejorative as well as descriptive term, “prawns” — are well visualized, …
Paris in the near future. Berlin-style walls have been put up around the ghettos to contain the spread of crime, and a WMD has fallen into the hands of a ganglord. The Hong Kong-style action and MTV-style camerawork fail to communicate the seriousness of the situation. With Cyril Raffaelli and …
Under house arrest for summer vacation (punchy opening scenes to explain how he got there), a troubled high-schooler begins to observe his surroundings through a pair of binoculars, and convinces himself that his neighbor is a serial killer and that the new girl next door is a hottie. Teenage suburban …
Flashy but extremely untidy comedy-thriller. A state of confusion is, perhaps, to be expected in a movie that juggles opera and white slavery, that juxtaposes the most wildly disparate settings, that buries its people beneath junkpiles of unrevealing quirks and knickknacks. And it is only fair to acknowledge the deliberateness …
An escapee of a Polish concentration camp hides out with a childless couple in his old Czech neighborhood -- a serious comedy, quite spiritual at the end, but with an insubstantial, unstable image. For moments of special intensity, the movie employs an odd, skipping, skidding kind of motion, mildly hallucinogenic. …
Misanthropic comedy from Palestine about hostilities and conflicts both intramural and across the Israeli border. It permits us if nothing else to reacquaint ourselves with the pleasures of composition, perspective, camera angle, the filmmaking basics. A tetchier Tati, director Elia Suleiman (who also appears as the, or a, central character) …
Bette Midler as a modernized Mae West who takes full advantage of what more she can get away with saying, gesturing, and gyrating, and doesn't have to trust to insinuation. She exercises a taste in songs not often carried over into her jokes, but she appears to enjoy herself enough …
The title alone told you that you needed to read no further in the Rebecca Wells novel. But the screen version, written and directed by Callie Khouri, temptingly makes room for one of our premier performers, Ellen Burstyn, in addition to Fionnula Flanagan, Maggie Smith, and Shirley Knight, troupers one …
Julian Schnabel relates another true-life tale from the wide world of art, this one a little more liberated from convention than his Basquiat or his Before Night Falls (though it immediately and continually brings to mind Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside), the tale of Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor at Elle …
California-bound cosmetic surgeon gets stalled in Grady, Georgia -- "Squash Capital of the South." A small-town panegyric that hinges to an extreme degree on the town's unlikeliest citizen: a tangle-haired vegetarian divorcée who skinny-dips in the lake, pees in the forest to scare the deer away from hunters, and repeatedly …
Becomes a patient. Becomes a better doctor because of it. (Starts combing his hair in a less severe, softer style too.) William I.M. Hurt is not terribly persuasive as either the cool, carefree doctor at the beginning or the warm and caring doctor at the end, but he does pretty …
Dan Aykroyd impersonates a Comparative Lit. professor who impersonates a Rhett Butler-ish Southern gentleman, a hapkido master, and an iron-fisted (literally) mobster. Nothing goes with anything else, and nothing goes by itself, either. With Howard Hesseman, T.K. Carter, and Kate Murtaugh; directed by Michael Pressman.
David Lean's vision of Pasternak's novel is designed for filmgoers who are prone to remark "ooh" and "ahh" at wide-screen pictures of flowers, icicles, deserts of snow, fields of wheat, and so forth. Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger.
Kurosawa, working for the first time in color (not counting the single dash of pink in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low), constructs an audaciously colored mosaic of a Japanese shanty-town — a basically muddy gray landscape brightened here and there by the gaudy hues of the slum dwellers' costumes, …