It starts off like an ill-informed parody of an art film (two miserable lovers trading accusations, in and out of their antiseptic white-on-white bedroom, all the day long), and it only really deviates when it crosses over cautiously, decorously, just a step or two, into the realm of hardcore pornography. …
The reunion of the stars and director of Pretty Woman (not to forget supporting actor Hector Elizondo) is a Nineties-style screwball comedy, tolerable to the degree that you can tolerate the two stars. For many, presumably, that will be highly. Julia Roberts's constant sending-out of signals in an effort to …
Semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film by the French-Canadian Léa Pool. In the first minute of action, the pubescent heroine dribbles a few drops of blood on the seashore rocks -- her first period, and a clarion warning of the perils and pitfalls of the coming-of-age film. But the girl, Karine Vanasse, proves …
Shoddy, to say nothing of smutty, documentary by Gough Lewis. Annabel Chong, to enlighten the innocent, is the nom-de-porn of Grace Quek, a snaggle-toothed, surgically scarred (beneath the breast, where else?), Singapore-born USC student, fluent in phrases like "massive existential crisis," whose chief claim to fame is that in 1995 …
Well-made if a tad cute and predictable account of a prodigal (but prosperous) son who returns to the humble Beijing bathhouse run by his father and retarded brother (a happy fool), under the misapprehension that his father has died. The public bath itself is a photogenic object, though it doesn't …
Screen transplant of a Sam Shepard stage play: an interminable tease about something that happened in the long-buried past, something to do with a horse-racing scam, something criminal, something "pornographic," something documented in a heavily taped-up shoebox. Untasty tidbits of it are doled out in flashback, with younger actors so …
Ghost story about a doleful little boy who sees dead people all around him and a wobbly child psychologist who tries to help him. It delivers three or four really good scares and a surprise ending that makes you want, or need, to sit through it a second time. The …
Blue-haired Matthew Lillard, in an overly intimate, aggressive, and needy relationship with the camera, guides us through the life of a punk-rock "anarchist" in Utah in the Eighties. A subject, certainly. But rough treatment. With Michael Goorjian, Annabeth Gish, Jennifer Lien; written and directed by James Merendino.
A Tim Burton film, for certain, from start to finish and top to bottom. The reimagination of Washington Irving's urbane folktale as a turn-of-the-century murder mystery (that's the Eighteenth turning to the Nineteenth), with Ichabod Crane transformed from a superstitious country schoolteacher into a forward-thinking big-city detective sent to the …
At bottom a murder trial of a Japanese-American in the volatile aftermath of World War II. The Australian director Scott Hicks, possibly overanxious to prove that Shine was no fluke, makes sure his hand is busily in evidence: the balusters in the railing of the courtroom balcony, through which one …
Low-suds soap opera about an estranged daughter -- poor, pregnant, unmarried, alcoholic -- who has her provincial mother on her hands while her father recuperates in the hospital. Ana Fernández, a shade too beautiful for the part, throws herself into it with abandon, and Maria Galiana upstages her with stolid …
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! There, I saved you ten dollars.
Feature length adult version of the animated television program.
The long-awaited (by some) prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, and such a letdown as to make you feel almost sorry for George Lucas, poor little rich boy. Even moviegoers who have never attended a foreign film in their lives are apt to be aware that Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden …