Something the cat dragged in -- a scruffy but not unappealing little movie, by Gus Van Sant, Jr., about a two-man, two-woman team of dope fiends who burglarize pharmacies to feed their habit. Its main tenor of amorphous, improvisational realism, its intermittent eruptions of high style and experimentation (the Wellesian …
The opening looks as tough an hour's worth of plot, passion, and pathos has been compressed into a slide show of rapid-fire images accompanied by a verbose, harried narrator (isn't it Lonny Chapman's voice?). This -- history whizzing past your eyes as the narrator rushes to keep pace -- goes …
Disney-esque formula sports film, directed by Charles Stone III, about a hot-shot freshman on a full scholarship to Atlanta A&T, who needs to learn the meaning of teamwork. Except that the "sport" isn't football, isn't basketball, isn't even a sport; it's the marching band (motto: "One band, one sound"), pointing …
Repetitious duel of wills between an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) and a tubercular thug (a very young and very histrionic Toshiro Mifune), mired together in a sort of urban swamp. The element of realism, in the postwar manner, does not conceal for a moment that the whole thing is allegoric. …
Provincial French couple get out of a rut and go off the rails after they meet The Queens of the Night, a cross-dressing nightclub team. A cheesily "provocative" premise given a boringly "serious" treatment. With Miou-Miou and Charles Berling; directed by Anne Fontaine.
Marlon Brando's fifteen-minute portrait of a Human Rights lawyer at work on a hopeless murder case in South Africa is a welcome dose of caginess in an otherwise artlessly direct protest film, with its burning gaze hardly wavering an inch from The Problem. (The lawyer's fondness for flowers in spite …
Fine costume piece. Well, the costumes anyhow are fine. The piece as a whole is only fairish, a predigested potage of 18th-century sexism, blueblood cold-bloodedness, paramours, bastards, the mandatory male heir, all of it “based on a true story.” Rachel Portman’s music, much more than Saul Dibb’s direction, creates the …
Veteran writer-director Mel Frank delivers one scene that's on a par with the material he used to give Bob Hope and Danny Kaye: two stagecoach passengers conversing in a sort of pidgin polyglot so as not to be understood by a third party ("el schmucko"). But by then, you are …
Modest little Mexican comedy by Fernando Eimbcke, shot in black-and-white, or anyway low-contrast gray, with an impassive static camera and a strong compositional eye for the artless, graceless lines and planes of a drab urbanscape. (The few grainy flashbacks with a mobile hand-held camera add nothing, and the one that …
The finale, a crescendo to an almost euphoric light-headedness, is a schizophrenic battle scene of abrupt time jumps and costume changes, and it disengages itself from logic far beyond the Marxes' usual tease-and-torment repartee. This is as high off the ground as the Brothers ever get. Directed by Leo McCarey.
Road comedy. Odd-couple comedy. Male-bonding comedy. In sum, computer-programmed comedy. An expectant father (Robert Downey, Jr.), desperate to reach the delivery room in time, is compelled by contrived circumstances to hitch a ride with a Hollywood-bound wannabe actor (Zach Galifianakis). The jokes, such as Dad’s ashes in a coffee can …
Simple-minded simplification of a wonderful Conrad tale about two officers in Napoleon's army who engage each other in a series of duels over a period of years. The duels are shot in a panicked manner that does not allow you to appreciate the action, and the rest of the scenes …
Shabby little comedy about a doo-wop group that time forgot (“In 1963 we were on top of the world”), three of whose members attempt a gold heist at a dental lab to finance a restaurant. Emotionally flat, despite the constant propping-up by golden oldies. The climactic concert raises more questions …
Big-screen transplant of the hayseed TV comedy circa 1980, a younger cousin of the likes of Smokey and the Bandit. There is thus a sort of rough justice in casting the mummified Burt Reynolds, the one-time Bandit, as an odious backwoods bigwig, a greedy pig named Hogg. One early chuckle …