What is a spoof of 8 Mile doing in the middle of a horror spoof? (Well, not in the middle exactly, but in the first fifteen minutes.) The Ring and Signs are the primary targets of leechery, but director David Zucker (BASEketball, Naked Gun, Top Secret, Airplane), rather than infuse …
An imposter substitute teacher, and local laughingstock rocker, instructs a class of grade-schoolers in What He Knows: rock-and-roll, history and practice. The participation of director Richard Linklater (Slacker, etc.) and screenwriter Mike White (The Good Girl, etc. ) might raise expectations slightly, and similarly raise the results: head of the …
Writer-director Gary Ross runs through the storied career of the too-small racehorse with the too-big jockey, blind in one eye to boot. In this treatment -- a simple horse story amplified into a social history -- the nag must lug the additional weight of the aggregate Little Guy and the …
Frayed coming-of-age yarn tied to a crusty-old-coot comedy. Robert Duvall and Michael Caine are mismatched as brothers, and even worse matched with their stand-ins in flashbacks. Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick; directed by Tim McCanlies.
Alan Rudolph's middle-class midlife-crisis comedy covers similar ground to a Fifties "women's picture": a devoted husband and father begins to suspect his wife of ten years, partner in his dental practice, and extracurricular opera buff, of carrying on an affair with a faceless somebody in a local production of Nabucco. …
The re-enacted downfall of up-and-coming journalist Stephen Glass, twenty-seven of whose forty-one pieces for The New Republic in the mid-Nineties turned out to have been fabricated in whole or in part. No great shakes as a movie, clumping along in the talking-heads style of a TV docudrama, the writing and …
Animated Arabian Nights tale: the ancient mariner given a contempo makeover ("You catch that last move? Pretty cool, huh?") and matched with an equal-opportunity kick-ass chick. What trace of the old Sinbad remains? His supposed noble sacrifice at the end, returning to Syracuse to face the music for the theft …
Three women -- Otar's mother, sister, and niece -- cope with life in post-Soviet Georgia after the man of the family seeks a better life in Paris. The biggest problem they must cope with is Otar's accidental death, a piece of news which the sister and niece conspire to conceal …
Condensed and Americanized version of Dennis Potter's seven-hour miniseries for British television: an author of "detective novels about a gumshoe who warbles," hospitalized and immobilized with a head-to-toe case of psoriasis, escapes into memory and imagination. The whole thing, not just the sessions with the resident head-shrinker (a disguised Mel …
Wrinkly romance between Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, both of whom fudge a bit on their ages (she, when she estimates herself to be "almost" twenty years older than an explicit thirty-six-year-old; and he, when he holds up three fingers to indicate how far he is past sixty), but both …
No, it's not Hitchcock, but it's suspenseful anyhow. Filmmaker Jeffrey Blitz follows eight of the 249 finalists in the National Spelling Bee, from widely varied backgrounds, through the two-day competition in Washington, D.C., and the weeks of preparation leading up to it. Only a serviceable documentary technique, and a subpar …
Time goes by for a Buddhist monk and his lone pupil on a floating sanctuary in a Korean lake. Slow, schematic, didactic, visually detailed, dramatically stunted. Kim Ki-Duk writes, directs, and stars.
The kind of big-theme fiction film that might expect to receive some brownie points in advance. Certainly Norman Jewison is that kind of filmmaker: In the Heat of the Night, F.I.S.T., And Justice for All, A Soldier's Story, Agnes of God, etc., etc. But the original novel by Brian Moore, …
The rare feature film to be built around a dwarf -- a taciturn loner who moves into an abandoned train depot in a remote corner of New Jersey to get away from other people ("Hey, buddy, where's Snow White?"), and who instead falls into a web of new relationships with …
Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown (The Endless Summer and The Endless Summer II), has grabbed a camera and followed his father's footprints into the surf, assembling a workmanlike testimonial to the religion of riding the waves. Inspirational illustration is evenly balanced with interview and voice-over pearls of wisdom: "The …