See the Jew. See the Jew peddle his wares. See the Jew see the shiksa. See the Jew kiss the shiksa. See the Jew get kicked in the teeth. Kick the Jew. Kick the Jew. Kick the Jew. A masochist's delight, set amid the gloom and grime of a Welsh …
A stationary camera collects random samples of modern urban life, as long as they're absurd, fantastic, grotesque, or nightmarish: "It's not easy being human." The language is Swedish, but we could be anywhere or nowhere. The sickly green tinge to the image is tantamount to looking through a dirty window …
Clint Eastwood's forty-sixth starring role is a sufficiently proper and plausible one for an actor of seventy years of age. Or anyway it has been made sufficiently so. Ample thought and talk have gone into the script to persuade us that Eastwood and no one else on earth can fix …
Hollywood film crew invades a sleepy little burg in rural Vermont. (The watchword on the streets is "Go you Huskies!") Make no mistake. The real invader, merciless as any Martian body snatcher, is writer-director David Mamet, who compels all his characters, natives and aliens alike, to speak his own secret …
Outer-space adventure ungenerous in invention as well as in duration: under ninety minutes. There is talk of a Rogue Moon, a Blue Giant, a dimension jump, and an evolutionary leap, but basically it's just a monster in a spaceship. And the monster is one of those indestructible types in a …
Flowery romanticism in seedy Shanghai. Two identical girls, two intertwined storylines, one of them viewed through the eyes and lenses of an unseen "videographer" (vaguely reminiscent of Robert Montgomery's experiment in subjective P.O.V., Lady in the Lake). In either storyline, the unsteady camera dictates the mood -- one of nervousness …
Flowery romanticism in seedy Shanghai. Two identical girls, two intertwined storylines, one of them viewed through the eyes and lenses of an unseen "videographer" (vaguely reminiscent of Robert Montgomery's experiment in subjective P.O.V., Lady in the Lake). In either storyline, the unsteady camera dictates the mood -- one of nervousness …
Nineteenth-century Japanese costume piece, 1865 to be exact, examines the flutter and flap in a samurai regiment (pledged to maintain order and put down uprisings) upon the enlistment of a babyfaced eighteen-year-old with doll-like feminine locks and a buttonhole mouth. He soon has more suitors than he could beat off …
Yet another little film to come out of the Sundance festival with big ideas, or big head. It undeniably had a concept to start with, pretty well summed up in the cutesy closing credit, "Based on a story by Duncan North. Based on an idea by Duncan North. Based on …
French comedy about the common humanity of disparate types. It marks the directorial debut of actress and author Agnès Jaoui, overseeing a calm and comfortable camera and a soft, sedate color palette. She, in collaboration with her long-time partner Jean-Pierre Bacri, is best remembered as the co-writer of Alain Resnais's …
Instructional, illustrative TV-style docudrama on the Cuban Missile Crisis, legitimately limited to the point of view from the Oval Office. (What in God's name were those Russkies thinking?) The doomsday scenario pushes us right up to the dizzying brink, albeit with a lifeline securely attached to our waist: we know …
A handicapped film about the handicapped: an agoraphobe who hasn't been out of his apartment, or let anyone into it, in eight years. We never actually see the protagonist (until the final shot, from behind); we only see through his eyes, as he conducts his affairs from his futuristic "visiophone" …
Something about foreign intervention in the Hong Kong drug market. Whether action or interlude, it goes by at a meaningless blur. With Nicholas Tse and Wu Bai; directed by Tsui Hark.
Mike Figgis's bona fide experimental feature: shot in digital video, in real time, with four separate cameras shooting simultaneous single-takes, an hour and a half in duration (no need, with digital video, to reload the camera), and then the screen divided into quadrants so that we see all four images …