Science-fiction juvenilia, in Robert Heinlein vein (or for nonreaders, George Lucas vein), about "humanity's last great hope" after the destruction of our planet by the dreaded Dredge in the 31st Century. The self-described "last great hope" is hardly more than a juvenile himself (voice of Matt Damon), and his foremost …
Life at a commune of Swedish hippies in the mid-Seventies: free love, the Revolution, vegetarianism, TM, cannabis, shaggy hair, the works. Frothy nostalgia laced with facile condescension and zoomy, pingpongy, herky-jerky camerawork. Best bit: two kids "playing torture," taking turns being Pinochet. Directed by Lukas Moodysson.
Steven Soderbergh holds forth for two and a half hours on the illicit drug trade. One hears that the narrative is "complex," but only in the strictly numerical sense of "consisting of two or more related parts" (courtesy of Webster's New World Dictionary). Three parts, to be absolutely exact. The …
Alias Miss Malaprop 2000, alias the Mistress of the Mixed Metaphor, a self-described "private defective," a peerless gum-chewer if not gumshoe, who stumbles upon a case of political chicanery while employed as a security guard at a Pacific Northwest casino. "You're out of your rocker," "ya gotta grab the bull …
Poky, painstaking, sparsely populated character study, set in America's Bread Basket, of an unfettered young stud -- a sort of budding Hud -- and his better nature. Based on a short story by Tom McNeal. With Anson Mount, Julianne Nicholson, Glenn Fitzgerald, Bob Burrus, Catherine Kellner; directed by Hilary Bir-mingham.
With two toddlers and a newborn to ride herd on, stressed-to-the-max mom Marlo (Charlize Theron) accepts her brother’s gift of a night nanny. Diablo Cody’s dialogue still sounds forced, but at least here, the characters don’t speak with one voice the way they did in Juno, the screenwriter’s first pairing …
A homeless puppy of a movie, set on Staten Island in the mid-Fifties, and centered around the one nice guy (Michael Rispoli) in a circle of Italian-American lunkheads, his henpecking ballbusting wife (Katherine Narducci), and an immigrant Irish expectant mother (Kelly Macdonald) whose drunken-bum husband abandons her as soon as …
A leaky old U.S. sardine can ("She's old, but she'll hold") is dispatched on a special-ops mission to swipe the Enigma Code Machine from a disabled U-boat, but the commandos end up with the entire German submarine on their hands, plus a German destroyer on their tails. Old-time WWII adventure …
M. Night Shyamalan's encore to The Sixth Sense, a hard act to follow. But follow it he dauntlessly does, all the way to a mandatory Surprise Ending. At first the fearsomeness of the task seems to drive him to overdirection, a big show of being busy: a woozy camera for …
A grown-up French film -- for grown-ups and about them -- on the subject of coping with loss. The loss, in this case, of a thick, slow, tired husband (Bruno Cremer) who, after twenty-five years of marriage, goes out for a swim on a seaside holiday and doesn't return. The …
W. Somerset Maugham in his famous potboiling mode: upper-crust Brits, an American Jew, and an Austrian refugee in Italy in the darkening days before WWII. A moral crisis, coupled with a ready-to-pounce Black Shirt, follows heavy foreshadowing and heavier coincidence and contrivance ("I took you for a goddess, and you're …
New York City nocturne: an unhappy gay man prowls the grim streets in grainy photography. What he's up to, and why, is strategically withheld from the viewer until the end. What he gets into in the meantime is not terribly gripping in itself. Dan Futterman, Samuel Ball, Matt Keeslar, Josh …
Rescue operation on the upper slopes of K2, where three survivors of an aborted climb are sealed up in a bottomless crevasse. The clock is ticking -- thirty-six hours to painful death by pulmonary edema -- and a Wages of Fear ingredient is added to the rescuers' knapsacks in the …
Tran Anh Hung re-locates to Hanoi, by all appearances a sleepier burg than the Saigon of his previous films, The Scent of Green Papaya and especially Cyclo. The action, to use the term loosely, centers around three grown sisters (thoughts of Chekhov begin to form) and the several men in …
Set in Michigan in the mid-Seventies (where they teach Henry James's Portrait of a Lady to high schoolers!), this tells of the extreme form of protest taken by the five blond Lisbon sisters to the repressive no-dating policy of their terminally square parents (James Woods and an almost unrecognizable Kathleen …