An enterprising Englander brings motion pictures to turn-of-the-century China (yes, the audience scatters at the sight of Lumière's oncoming train), opening the gates to traditional Eastern themes of Old vs. New, Commoner vs. Noble. Ann Hu's tribute to the pioneers is sweet, simple, even simple-minded, and ever so slow. Her …
A high-concept low comedy from the Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby. The concept, which might from these filmmakers pass for sensitivity, enables the babe-chasing hero (Jack Black, a serviceable Joe Blow) to see the inner beauty of the people around him after he has spent a short time in a …
From the E. Annie Proulx novel about a widower named Quoyle who returns with his daughter Bunny to his Newfoundland roots, and becomes (among other things) the ace reporter on a local rag called The Gammy Bird. A tall tale, a dark tale, a droll tale, arch, sardonic, grotesque, gaudy, …
This computer-animated twist on the Beauty-and-Beast theme -- the chivalric quest of a lonely, touchy, Scots-accented ogre and his volunteer sidekick, a wisecracking ass sans Sancho Panza, to rescue a martial-arts princess from a fire-breathing dragon and a Machiavellian bridegroom -- is relentlessly clever, relentlessly ironic, relentlessly hip, or just …
Multi-character cross-pollination romantic comedy, widely described as Woody Allenesque. This seems to signify that (a) it takes place in New York City; (b) the line, "What are you talking about?," is spoken frequently and disingenuously when the speaker knows full well what's being talked about; and (c) the writer-director is …
Guy Ritchie's mainstream rehash of his Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, the same collection of "colorful" characters (Bullet-Tooth Tony, Franky Four Fingers, Boris the Blade, et al.), the same hectic crisscross of underworld factions, the same violent collision of these, and the same stylistic superficiality, flashiness, trendiness, and conformism …
Desperately cute romantic comedy revolving around an unlucky-in-love career girl (Ashley Judd: is she trying to be cute, too, when she twice pronounces "realtor" as "real-a-tor"?) who develops a "New Cow Theory," whereby men are posited to be like bulls in their boredom with prior sexual partners: "neophiliacs." The heedlessly …
A prim, proper, prissy musicologist, pissed off at again getting passed over for promotion, flees to the Appalachians to visit her schoolmarm sister, and discovers in those mountains a hidden gold mine of folk music (this is in 1907) crying out to be documented. The music itself is agreeable and …
A startling change of pace, so we're told, for the director and star, Nanni Moretti: "the Italian Woody Allen." That's hard to gauge, however, much less appreciate, when only one of his nine features and numerous shorts, 1993's Caro Diario, has been granted distribution. Not much pace can be built …
Last day at the office of a retiring Company man, or CIA agent to you laymen, Robert Redford. He has just learned that his prize protégé, Brad Pitt, has gotten himself arrested on an unauthorized mission in China, and is scheduled for execution in twenty-four hours. His superiors, mindful of …
Video vérité by Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim (with a diluted watery image in its transfer to film), on the rise and fall of an Internet company called "GovWorks.com," founded by a couple of buddies from high school: "We help government work." The camera, as in Hegedus's The War Room, …
An altruistic free spirit, dying of Hodgkin's, teaches an ad-agency workaholic how to live: no wristwatch, no TV, etc. Pat O'Connor's re-do of a 1968 comedy-drama (at the height of Flower Power) is equally embarrassing in either mood. With Charlize Theron in the Sandy Dennis role, Keanu Reeves in the …
A deplorable high-tech, high-impact, high-explosive thriller, the opening lines of which -- "You know, the problem with Hollywood is they make shit. Unbelievable, unremarkable shit" -- apparently hope to summon up some preventative voodoo. Or hope at the very least to beat you to the punch. The movie at its …
Veteran director John Boorman's treatment of a "light" spy novel by John le Carré. Neither the director nor the original novelist (as well as co-screenwriter and executive producer) is much noted for humor, and their unabating stabs at it here are not so much martini-dry as they are day-old-champagne flat. …