Dark comedy, photographically as much as temperamentally, about a disturbed adolescent (Jake Gyllenhaal of October Sky) who has an imaginary friend in a demonic bunny suit giving him mischief-making orders. (The bunny's end-of-the-world forecast, however, carries little weight when the action is set in the thick of Dukakis's run for …
Dark comedy, photographically as much as temperamentally, about a disturbed adolescent (Jake Gyllenhaal of October Sky) who has an imaginary friend in a demonic bunny suit giving him mischief-making orders. (The bunny's end-of-the-world forecast, however, carries little weight when the action is set in the thick of Dukakis's run for …
Reunion of the writing and directing team of Paris, Texas, Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders, for a similarly slow-moving road movie, which seems to be set in an alternative universe where there still exists in the present day, much as it existed half a century earlier, a class of people …
Nicolas Roeg's psychic thriller, taken from a death-in-Venice story by Daphne Du Maurier, is largely feints and loose ends. What with the free-swingingness of the camerawork and the jaggedness of the cutting (the celebrated Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland lovemaking bout comes out looking like Illustrations A through J in a Danish …
While waiting for his fifteen-year-old daughter to emerge from touch-and-go surgery for a head trauma, a doctor examines in flashback his double life as the upstanding husband of a cool blond beauty and as the rough lover, in fact rapist in the first place, of an earthy dark peasant. It's …
Absurd kidnap scheme, to adopt the adjective of the psychiatrist-hero (Michael Douglas) to describe his one-day task (or else...) of unlocking the subconscious of a ten-year mental patient (Brittany Murphy) and retrieving a six-digit figure of unknown relevance. No less absurd is the idea that the kidnappers themselves would know …
And Mom's away in Australia for two months! A growing experience for the five kids; a shrinking experience for the spectator. The color alone, a salad tossed by garbage truck, is enough to make you cover your head. Christina Applegate, Keith Coogan, Joanna Cassidy; directed by Stephen Herek.
Agents of Heaven and Hell -- Victoria Abril and Penelope Cruz, respectively -- are sent to Earth to fight over the soul of a boxer. The plane of the action is mostly mundane (labor unrest, domestic tension), but the actresses supply much gusto (or to the viewer, mucho gusto), and …
The Rapid Response Tactical Squad travels through a portal known as the Ark to get to Olduvai, Mars, and hunt down slimy creatures in semi-darkness. Mindless kill-and-be-killed action film, based on a video game, with one shooting-gallery section, from a subjective POV over a gunsight, and a musical background of …
Homosexual filmmaker Gregg Araki (The Living End, Totally F***ed Up) goes hetero, though not exactly "straight," in an épater les bourgeois abomination about an on-the-road ménage-à-trois motel rooms, junk food, belches, tough talk ("Don't get your uterus all tied in a knot" and "I'm so pissed at you I could …
Mutant Mad Max. “Same shit, different era,” as somebody says. All but wiped out by the Reaper Virus, walled off in quarantine for twenty-five years, Scotland in 2035 retains two hostile clans, heavy-metal cannibals and retro-Medieval knights in armor. Enter, from the English side of the wall, a one-eyed kick-ass …
Tod Williams's adaptation of only a fraction of the John Irving novel, A Widow for One Year. That fractionalization may account for the slight feeling of aimlessness and lack of focus. The basic situation is tidy enough: an aspiring author in his junior year at Exeter comes for the summer …
And Jim Morrison. Oliver Stone's conventional, chronological biography bashes along at a breakneck pace, barely touching ground, barreling right into the middle of events, forgoing the surrounding context and grabbing at the harried TV director's daily lifesaver: the constant closeup. There may be some justification for this device in the …
Spike Lee voiced displeasure at being branded after his first film "the black Woody Allen," and in truth his ambitions, though no less large, run in a quite different direction (and at even a faster clip) than those of the maker of Interiors and September and such. Lee's third feature …
Nothing-is-as-it-seems love triangle, composed of a Brit, a Brazilian, and a Spaniard, in London. Writer-director Matthew Parkhill, in his feature debut, conceals the complete illogicality until the "sucker-punch" twist. In the meantime, he reveals the charms of Gael García Bernal and Natalia Verbeke. With James D'Arcy, Tom Hardy, Charlie Cox.