John Sayles tries to extend his famous feel for common folk to post-WWII Ireland, Land of the Twee, in a twinkly tale of Celtic quaintness and preciosity -- a tale of the sea, the old ways, the family. A very engaging young blond girl, after the death of her mother, …
From the Jane Austen shelf, a cinematic Classics Illustrated. And altogether an agreeable comedy of manners, though hardly on course to become a classic in its own right. In its own medium, to be more precise. Ang Lee, of Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet, is the perhaps …
A metropolitan murder mystery that, in the Golden Age of the detective novel, might well have appealed to Ellery Queen: somebody is killing people in graphic illustration of the Seven Deadly Sins, and littering the crime scenes with quotations from Milton, Shakespeare, etc. We do not now, naturally, have an …
Classical, mythic, generic gangster film set in the Golden Age of the Thirties, albeit in the Far-Afield East. The merely and excessively decorative element in the work of Zhang Yimou (in Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, and Raise the Red Lantern, less excessive in The Story of Qiu Ju and To …
We open on a tight shot of Tang Shuisheng’s (Xiaoxiao Wang) face, the world swarming around him. And for the next 7 days, we view life exclusively through the 14-year-old boy’s eyes. It’s the provincial lad’s first visit to the big city. (Recreating Shanghai in the 1930s was a task …
Big-budget skinflick. Big deal. The storyline, something like a Jackie Susann or Jackie Collins novel condensed to a single thin thread, could have been completely mapped out by the scriptwriter while waiting for his sausage-and-eggs order to be filled at Denny's: an aspiring dancer (face of a papier-mâché death's-head, temperament …
"Based on true events": the slaying of their employers by two sibling housemaids in provincial France in the 1930s. Jean Genet wrote a play about it. Nico Papatakis made a previous film about it (with actual sisters in the roles of the maids). And now we have a disorientingly English-accented …
Droll stories, or droll vignettes, or droll sketches, of the walking wounded in the vicinity of a Brooklyn cigar store. Occasionally, at least once anyhow, something poignant occurs: a grieving widower, paging through the storekeeper's "conceptual" photo album of identically framed snapshots taken outside his shop at the same time …
Damply sentimental seriocomedy about a couple of recent additions to the New York City melting pot, an illegal Montenegran and a legal Spaniard. For foreign-film buffs, one point of interest will be to try to recognize the aged Maria Casares (Orpheus, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne) behind a pair …
Marital disruptions and reconciliations in a "respectable" Southern family, thrashed out in dialogue that sounds as if you ought to be keeping tally on a scoreboard. Kyra Sedgwick is well cast as the sister of Julia Roberts (at least as far as the flat wide lips and creeping-vine tresses: no …
Alien crossed with Lifeforce: a literally lethal lady, and frequently naked one, who metamorphoses into a long-headed crustacean for the purposes of propagation. The rapidly unspooling plotline is mildly misogynistic: the creature starts out as a barely pubescent nymphet (first stirrings of feminine power), injected at birth with some extraterrestrial …
Giuseppe Tornatore, fresh from a short sojourn in France for A Pure Formality, is back in Fellini country: a phony talent scout (Sergio Castellitto) collects small fees from peasants in postwar Sicily in return for screen tests and the hope of stardom. Irony battles bathos and gets beaten badly. With …
Twin brothers, identical except as to ethics, wrangle over the Santa Barbara estate of their adoptive mother. Sprawling family saga never recovers from its stumbling start: flashback within flashback within flashback, in an attempt to set its feet. Some attractive cast members -- Andy Garcia in one of his two …
BBC dramatization of a 1969 skirmish between gay-bar patrons and the NYPD, elevated, in effect, into the Lexington of the American homosexual revolution: the outbreak of open hostilities. Self-confessedly (self-defensively) immersed more in legend than in fact, and thus functional more as pep rally than as history lesson. There is …
Apocalyptic science fiction, counting down the final days and hours and minutes to the turn of the millennium (a/k/a 2K). The main gimmick -- the main gadget -- is a total-sensory recording and playback device (an advance on home video, an advance on virtual reality) whose chief function in the …