A winning performance in a losing cause: the humorous, bright, protean Sandra Oh as the modern, free-spirited, unmarried (and unaccented) daughter of traditional Chinese immigrant parents, in Vancouver, B.C. All very familiar, except for Oh. With Stephen M.D. Chang, Alannah Ong, Frances You, and Callum Rennie; written and directed by …
There are two van Dammes on screen: one a Hong Kong hard case who slicks down his hair and chomps on stogies, the other a Beverly Hills exercise instructor who wears trendy togs and tries to be pleasant, both of them on the same side in a separated-at-birth revenge tale. …
Trash with pedigree: a novel by Cain, a script co-authored by Chandler, and fine work from Stanwyck and MacMurray, the latter of whom can always make sin look so unpleasurable. But this is not one of Billy Wilder's more personal projects, shallow and sleazy, and only conformistly cynical instead of …
A wronged-woman thriller in which the flattery of the heroine reaches such nauseating heights as to call into question its sincerity. (The once-in-a-million-lifetimes event of driving an automobile off a moving ferry into the bay, while one hand is cuffed to the door handle and the other is fending off …
Krzysztof Kieslowski weighs in with some whole-cloth testimony on behalf of the science of physiognomy. Two identical women are born on the same day in different countries. As adults, they both wear their hair alike; they both are classical singers (with the voice emanating from nowhere near the mouth); they …
Jean-Claude van Damme tries out his third Hong Kong director, Tsui Hark, after John Woo (Hard Target) and Ringo Lam (Maximum Risk). He gets tirelessly hard work out of the man (and one outstanding shot, a closeup of van Damme's jiggling eyes as he is running at full tilt), but …
From the prize-winning stage play by John Patrick Shanley, an ambiguous drama of possible priestly pedophilia at a Catholic school in the Bronx. The playwright, perhaps best known to moviegoers as the writer of Moonstruck and writer-director of Joe versus the Volcano, handles the direction of his own work on …
Based loosely on Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, this is Paul Mazursky's second attempt at a transatlantic transplant (the first was Willie and Phil, from Truffaut's Jules and Jim) -- and better luck this time. In fact, better luck than the original. The anarchic vagabond and the bourgeois home he …
Losers' Club comedy by Jim Jarmusch, with a befitting small-change budget, about an unemployed deejay and an apathetic pimp who are placed in the same prison cell in Louisiana, soon to be joined by an Italian immigrant with a do-it-yourself English phrase book ("Not enough room here to swing a …
Two-and-a-half-hour countdown to the end of the Third Reich. Bruno Ganz, digging into his meatiest role in years, looks and sounds fine as the Führer and filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel's strict adherence to documented history, and to the precise design and décor of the infamous bunker, give the film some educational …
Alfre Woodard, with her sparkling fencing match of emotions, is good to see in a role of almost any size, and better to see in a bigger one. For a change, she has the lead, a substance-abusing Chicago single mom who glues herself and her family back together in the …
Edward Norton enacts a soft-spoken, slick-shootin', sore-thumb cowboy in the San Fernando Valley (nowhere sorer than in synagogue), who enters an inadvisable relationship with a too-young girl, the succulently photographed Evan Rachel Wood. His self-styled Westerner persona ("You can be anybody you want to be. You just have to decide …
Sort of a kinky thriller, which is to say definitely kinky but only sort of a thriller, re-enacting the ostensibly “true events” of a self-mutilating married woman finding on the Internet a compatible sadist willing for a fee to put her out of her misery. Director Johan Renck, rather than …
Lifeless reincarnation of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (or, for a newer generation, 1978's Heaven Can Wait). The gimmick is that the man we see as Chris Rock -- the man temporarily installed in another man's body -- is seen by everyone on screen as a portly, gray-haired, middle-aged white guy. …
Dishonor among thieves, with modestly mod trimmings, primarily a metronomic score by Berlin Game that just won't quit. There are shades of Diva, not least in its incoherence, and shades of Romancing the Stone, and just plain shades -- i.e., dark glasses. In a cast of little-knowns, Carey Lowell, a …