Banned in China! Apparently for having the temerity to suggest that Party politics -- through the Rectification Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution -- could be oppressive to private individuals. Cultural Relativism in action! Sort of a Frank Borzage heart-tugger (Little People tossed by Big Storms) without …
Two shipwrecked children of opposite sexes come of age all by themselves in an island paradise, and as in the Garden of Eden the female proves to be the inquisitive, trouble-making one. Randal Kleiser's remake of the old Henry DeVere Stacpoole tale parades under the banner of Natural Beauty, but …
Smart Southern Baptist boy swallows enough religious hypocrisy to sour him on Texas Baptist College and decides to head north to godless liberal-land (Reed College in Oregon). It isn’t long before he’s knocking back tall ones and knocking religion as primitive, but what do you know, love has a way …
After demonstrating his overwhelming soccer talent, high school sophomore Seishiro Nagi receives an invitation to the Blue Lock Project and meets strikers from all over the country.
Director, co-writer, and star Mathieu Amalric (Venus in Fur) serves up a short, slight, somewhat Frenchie crime story. Meaning: the runtime is 76 minutes, the interest comes mainly from the chopped-up-and-scrambled timeline, and there's a little ooh-la-la arthouse nudity at the outset to catch your interest. Everyone involved in this …
Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, as a couple of Chicago white boys tuned to a rhythm-and-blues wavelength, expand the musical act they unveiled on television's Saturday Night Live into a full-blown slapstick chase movie, travelling through a meaningful cultural landscape that includes a Catholic orphanage, a black Baptist church, a …
Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, as a couple of Chicago white boys tuned to a rhythm-and-blues wavelength, expand the musical act they unveiled on television's Saturday Night Live into a full-blown slapstick chase movie, travelling through a meaningful cultural landscape that includes a Catholic orphanage, a black Baptist church, a …
A for-want-of-anything-better-to-do movie. It at least serves as a reminder that John Landis made a good one once. Eighteen years earlier. His lack of inspiration here extends to the clodhopping parade of face shots, the paraphrasing and plagiarizing of the original, the employment of the Russian mafia as straw badmen, …
Jessica Lange as the mood-swinging, not to forget hip-swinging, wife of a steadfast army guy (Tommy Lee Jones), ca. 1960. She fashions herself after BB and MM (or momentarily, when transferred from a base in Hawaii to one in Alabama, Bette Davis: "What a dump!"). She teases, she flaunts, she …
Kathryn Bigelow got some deserved attention for her revisionist vampire film, Near Dark. Having got it, she seems in a mood for some showing-off, with a full arsenal of camera lenses and sheets of blue light and silhouettes and moodscapes and fetishistic closeups and color "studies" and documentary inserts and …
Winner of the French Touch prize in the Critics’ Week lineup of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Director Constance Tsang’s intimate, sensitively observed drama stars Lee Kang-sheng (Vive L'Amour, Goodbye, Dragon Inn) alongside Wu Ke-xi and Xu Haixpeng as three Chinese immigrants living in Flushing, Queens—he’s a construction worker, they’re …
Several Stanford University acid heads of the late Sixties are experiencing a delayed reaction to a special LSD recipe called "Blue Sunshine," a reaction characterized by a complete and embarrassing loss of hair and a subsequent urge toward gruesome homicide. (Nice touch: one of the drug victims loses a clump …
Lazily plotted paranoid thriller. The main instrument of paranoia is a crowd-control combat helicopter that can see and hear through solid walls. But the technology-crazy moviemakers can't hide their ambivalence about this. They seem to feel that such a Big Brother weapon is quite all right as long as it's …
Derek Cianfrance’s first feature is about a boyish ex-con (Ryan Gosling) who lacks ambition. His more focused wife (Michelle Williams), a nurse, tires of his limitations as drink, temper, dutiful sex, and parenting corrode the remains of romance. Williams is excellent, Gosling ragged. In a way that recalls John Cassavetes’s …