Catherine Breillat, director of the assorted sexual provocations of Fat Girl, Romance, and Anatomy of Hell, is a name likely to strike terror in the hearts of filmgoers far more than that of George Romero, say, or Dario Argento. But where the 19th-century setting and idiomatic Romanticism of her previous …
Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it. As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien …
Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it. As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien …
A paradigm, practically a parody, of the American Independent Film, the coming-of-age of a vulnerable high-school girl (the conventionally "pretty" Agnes Bruckner, whose discomfort is contagious), with an overtaxed mother ("You're an ungrateful brat!"), an absent father, a self-mutilating little sister, a nose-ringed bosom buddy, and a caring English teacher …
Worth seeing for the face-reddening, throat-constricting, vein-popping performance of Nick Nolte as a college basketball coach fashioned after Indiana U.'s Bobby Knight (who appears as himself in the climactic game, opposite Nolte on the sideline). At any rate he is fashioned after Knight up until he forges a Faustian pact …
An adaptation of a very early Ross Macdonald novel, or in other words nearer the slam-bang manner of Dashiell Hammett than the surgical delicacy of later-Macdonald: he wasn't yet himself in 1947. Compared with the Byzantine structures of The Galton Case and The Chill, this one would seem to have …
Scriptwriter and former film critic Paul Schrader's directing debut, a hot-under-the-blue-collar propagandrama about how the System contrives to divide and conquer the workers in the Detroit auto industry. (The manufacturers of Checker cabs, who opened their facilities to the filmmakers, are graciously absolved, in the acknowledgments, of any likeness to …
Can the local Hawaiian surfer chick bounce back from a near drowning, conquer her fear, and win the Pipemasters Contest at the same time as she romances a GQ NFL QB? Director John Stockwell, of Crazy/Beautiful, murmurs some feminist sweet nothings, but his PC lip service is overcome by a …
Seamy mystery story about a discharged veteran (the military experience explains his poker-faced savoir-faire in the face of death) who returns from the war accompanied by a shell-shocked puppylike Army buddy, and who arrives at his tacky L.A. apartment just in time for his wife's murder. Raymond Chandler's script outfits …
Dai Miyamoto's life is turned upside down the day he discovers jazz. A former high school basketball player, Dai picks up a saxophone and begins practicing day and night, determined to become one of the greatest of all time. He leaves his sleepy hometown for the bustling nightclubs of Tokyo, …
Amorphous, garrulous, largely improvised, largely sedentary companion piece to Smoke, centered again around the Brooklyn Cigar Co. (Harvey Keitel is the only returning big-name star, so you get to hear the word "Auggie" spoken aloud another thirty or forty times.) Co-directors Wayne Wang and Paul Auster should have quit while …
The large-scale 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the subsequent crackdown on freedoms provide the urgent anchoring point for this remarkable vision from HK filmmaker Chan Tze Woon, a genre-defying plunge into the political morass that has been ever-widening between the former colony and the controlling Chinese state. Taking …
A sleepy-eyed 15-year-old schoolgirl (Adèle Exarchopoulos) begins a torrid love affair with an older, wild-eyed artist (Léa Seydoux) that could possibly end in infidelity. As if three hours weren’t enough to tell this paper-thin story, we won’t know what happens to the couple until part two arrives. This year’s Palm …
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen wrote a zingy throwaway line ridiculing a saliva dribbling, shopping bag-schlepping lunatic who wanders screaming into a cafeteria. We mock the things we are to be. Thirty-six years (and just as many films) later finds him crafting an entire feature around a more upscale version …