Splendid credits sequence: car-window tracking shots around a forlorn Nowheresville of strip malls, middle-class housing developments, trailer park, construction site, etc. (On the soundtrack, "Town without Pity" by Gene Pitney: "How can we keep love alive,/ How can anything survive,/ When these little minds tear you in two?") Then filmmaker …
Arty little number about the falsehoods and fictions in the one-day fling of an unemployed actress in Queens and a resident of the Presbyterian homeless men's shelter, seemingly mistaken for a famous film director. David Suchet is somewhat heavy, somewhat immovable in the male lead, and the out-of-focus camerawork when …
Frigid Canadian film about a multiple-fatality school-bus accident and its aftermath: well worked out thematically, not so well dramatically. Though the readings from, and congruencies with, Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin (in a handsome volume illustrated by Kate Greenaway) are heavy-handed and over-obvious, the idea of "loss" is …
Beautifully simple in construction, the fiftieth (or so) film in the forty-year career of Claude Chabrol allots its first fifteen minutes to the smooth operation of a time-tested scam. We are placed in the situation without benefit of rehearsal, but we soon see where it is headed. We follow along. …
Backwash from the big splash of Seven: a diabolical serial killer with a tauntingly personal relationship to his pursuer. The seemingly unconnected story strands are mildly intriguing until you understand the connection. With understanding, comes incredulity. And irritation. Dennis Quaid, Danny Glover, Jared Leto, R. Lee Ermey, Ted Levine; written …
Taste, too, of the esoteric cinema of Iran's Abbas Kiarostami. The concept of the film is simplicity itself. Most of its action takes place in and around a two-door hatchback, which the stone-faced middle-aged protagonist drives round and round the twisting unpaved roads of a barren, brown, and ugly construction …
The Americanization of an immigrant teen from Hungary, under the tutelage of a rock-and-roll deejay in Cleveland (a/k/a "the Mistake on the Lake," or, to natives, "the Best Location in the Nation"), during the infamous days of payola: a past pretty near Medieval, it would appear, in its darkness. Joe …
Out with the old traditional China and in with the new decadent China, from the Nineteen Teens to the Thirties. Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine, engineers here a similarly fulsome, semihysterical "epic," in a hyperkinetic visual style suggestive variously of a taffy pull, a finger painting, a …
Bleak view of postwar Russia, oppressively photographed in army-fatigues green and khaki brown, save for a semi-sunny brief interlude at the Black Sea. Shameless heart-tugging in the form of a saucer-eyed tyke who was born in the mud and who keeps seeing the ghost of the father he never knew. …
King Lear updated and upended from a feminist point of view. More exactly, King Lear as it might play out if re-set in the modern-day Midwest and if the deteriorating patriarch had molested his two older daughters in their early teens. Who were once bad, that is to say, are …
Lelouchian itinerary of coincidence and convergence on the road map of romance -- but cutesified to the heights of embarrassment. And after all, the entire thing is one, long, teasingly delayed Meet-Cute. (The model is probably Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle, more than Lelouch's And Now My Love.) Sarah Jessica …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …
High-tech re-enactment of the 20th Century's most storied shipwreck, re-enacted well enough by the British in semi-documentary style in A Night to Remember. Director James Cameron's self-deluding bright idea seems to have been to humanize this spectacle, and to do so he has fastened onto the most hackneyed have-and-have-not romance …
Bond is back, Brosnan is back. (Bad news and worse.) Long-winded pre-credits sequence; nondescript title tune; megalomaniac and minions; explosions; chases; thudding double-entendres ("You always were a cunning linguist, James"); gadgets; computers; girls. No surprise; no suspense; no pulse. Jonathan Pryce, Teri Hatcher, Michelle Yeoh; directed by Roger Spottiswoode.