Tasteless, touchless, but strongly smelling sports comedy, wherein Average Joe's little mom-and-pop gymnasium and its corporate neighbor Globo Gym ("We're better than you and we know it") are on a collision course for the $50,000 prize money in a Vegas dodgeball tournament. The motto of the underdog is the motto …
Sidney Lumet's three-ring-circus staging of a bungled bank stickup, Brooklyn, 1972, that turned into a hot summer day standoff between the robbers and their hostages, inside the bank, and the N.Y.P.D. and F.B.I. outside. An exemplary New York street movie, rich in incident of the Oh-God-what-next variety. Also an exemplary …
Nancy Savoca, whose first film was True Love, resumes her theme of miscommunication or noncommunication between the sexes: a foursome of U.S. Marines, ca. 1963, have made a habit and a formalized competition of trying to round up the ugliest dates for a kind of upside-down beauty pageant, with a …
Filmmaker Kevin Smith shows some nerve, though maybe not as much of it as he showed in Chasing Amy. Where, in the mature-adult-relationship stuff of that previous film, he took a chance on alienating the affections of his callow followers from Clerks and Mallrats (an already dwindling band), he takes …
Filmmaker Kevin Smith shows some nerve, though maybe not as much of it as he showed in Chasing Amy. Where, in the mature-adult-relationship stuff of that previous film, he took a chance on alienating the affections of his callow followers from Clerks and Mallrats (an already dwindling band), he takes …
Danish director Lars von Trier follows up Dancer in the Dark with another unrecognizable portrait of America. A pedantic or facetious moral tale, it takes place in Depression-period costume on a sparse and stylized stage set, which from overhead looks like a near life-sized blueprint of a tiny town in …
The Stephen King industry clatters on, with a stretched-out little wisp whose main distinction in the canon of King adaptations is the attention to Maine accents: "Stawp thaht," etc. The story is a straightforward either/or proposition. Did the housekeeper kill the crotchety old widow or did she not? Did she, …
Suspenser in the tried-and-true pattern of the Boy Who Cried Wolf: a mendacious early adolescent (Matt O'Leary, vulnerable as required) who discovers that his well-heeled new stepdad (Vince Vaughn) is first of all a heel and next of all a psychopathic killer. The police might be forgiven for disbelieving that …
Paul Schrader's telling of the backstory to The Exorcist -- the Nazis, the loss of faith, the postwar archaeological dig in Africa, the first exorcism, the renewed vocation -- had been deemed unreleasable in its finished form, and been replaced by Renny Harlin's retooling of it from scratch, with the …
Jorge Amado's story about the ghost of an insatiable Don Juan who comes back to haunt his widow, now remarried to a respectable dullard, somewhat resembles a 1930s Thorne Smith confection, except with a grittier texture to its ambience, its sex play, and its naughty jokes. The authentic sensuousness of …
A flat glass of bubbly in which Brando, with dyed yellow hair and an out-of-puff delivery, plays psychiatrist to a young fantasist (the drowsy Johnny Depp) who may not be the real Don Juan, may not have made love to over a thousand women by the age of twenty-one, but …
Art-house fare in America, but on its merits hardly more than grindhouse fodder, cheaply and shoddily made, to do with three girls from Leeds on holiday in Mallorca, who hook up with four guys from home for a seafaring night of illicit drugs, rough sex, and accidental homicide that spirals …
Jacques Demy cannot stifle the urge to infiltrate Charles Perrault's Medieval fairytale with his own sophisticated witticisms (the magic donkey of the tale produces jewels from its rear, rather than its ear; the women at a costume ball are dressed as birds and the men as cats), as well as …
Inside the Mafia, on the elbow of an FBI infiltrator. And all of a sudden Lefty from Mulberry Street won't go anywhere without Don the Jeweller. The factual basis adds little in the way of interest or excitement, although it seems to inspire a desire to instruct (mustaches are "against …