A serious bore. Keith Gordon's adaptation of a Scott Spencer novel chronicles the Nixon-era relationship of a working-within-the-system political animal (Billy Crudup) and his subversive boat-rocking lover (Jennifer Connelly), and their continuing, or resuming, relationship during his first Congressional campaign eight years after her death in a right-wing Chilean car-bombing. …
Your monthly serial-killer fix. Your killer, as you like him, is an egomaniacal taunter, Fed-Ex-ing photos of his targeted victims to the cops, twenty-four hours prior to strangulation. For the role, Keanu Reeves lowers and loudens his speaking voice, sounding about as self-assured as a seventeen-year-old when attempting to purchase …
Spawn of Tarantino. A gory, amoral, all-attitude caper thriller, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie (writer only on The Usual Suspects), who arranges such a crowded schedule of "startling" revelations that they soon become ho-hum revelations. Juliette Lewis, the kidnapped surrogate mother (ready to pop), is in rough proximity to …
Acceptable encore to the ghost stories of the year previous, The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes. Fully equal to them in the voltage of the jolts, and even the overall number of them. Emptier of ideas, however; more mechanical in execution; but at the same time sleeker in surface …
It has a rather weighty science-fiction component: the time-honored theme of the superiority of emotional humans to unemotional superhumans. But then it's supposed to be funny in addition. The idea -- fairly intelligent for a Hollywood comedy, which might help explain its pratfall at the box-office -- is to take …
Another art-house food movie: Turkey Day in the L.A. melting pot, a celebration of (you guessed it) diversity. African-American, Jewish, Chicano, Vietnamese, young, old, lesbian, vegetarian, dachshund, whatever. Good strong work from Alfre Woodard (as usual), Mercedes Ruehl (ditto), Maury Chaykin ("You know Michael Landon from Bonanza? He was Jewish. …
The battle of the sexes, rigged for the distaff side. A male chauvinist ad exec (Mel Gibson, cranked up a few notches) receives a jolt of electricity and, miraculously, the consequent power to hear women's thoughts. After a bumpy period of adjustment, he settles comfortably into the role of enemy …
Southern-fried chick flick. Seventeen-year-old Novalee Nation, westbound and pregnant, is superstitious about fives (her ma ran out on the fifth of the month; it took fifty-five stitches to close her steak-knife wound; etc.), so when the cashier at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart rings up her change at $5.55, she knows for …
Mindlessly chipper caper film, shot with enough wide-angle distortions to destroy all confidence in Marek Kanievska's camera placements. It revolves around a cagy, crusty old professional bank robber (Paul Newman) who fakes a stroke in order to get out of prison and into a nursing home, where he falls into …
Humdrum hit-man comedy, as thick with Cupid's arrows as with bullets. Matthew Perry, playing a Montreal dentist caught in the crossfire, works harder for his laughs than the rest of the cast combined, and his reward is to be the only one of them who raises even a weak smile. …
Fact-based historical nugget, set on a French-Canadian island off Newfoundland in the mid-19th Century, about the rehabilitation of a condemned murderer and the efforts of the islanders to save him from the guillotine. Solemn, sanctimonious, and simplistic: the almost universal change of heart toward the murderer is swift, undermotivated, and …
Fine French thriller centered around the self-anointed "liberator" of a (literally) harried family man. Admittedly the movie is slow to the boiling point, and in truth never really rises above a simmer. Any impatience with it, however, would be a reflection more on Hollywood brainwashing than on filmmaker Dominik Moll's …
A sweet nothing assembled from pre-tested art-house ingredients: food, samba, magic realism, a you-go-girl transvestite, and, at the center of it all, Penelope Cruz as a hot-blooded Brazilian (a few years past it would have been Sonia Braga) whose endowments in beauty and in culinary artistry are counterbalanced by the …
An adaptation of the novel by Michael Chabon -- and an odd choice of project for Curtis Hanson, or at least it seems so if you resist the conclusion, even after L.A. Confidential, that Hanson has gone bookish and gone parvenu. A "smart," tart, dark, literate, adult comedy, set in …
Sorrow and pity for the whole human race, or at least the English race, courtesy of the magnanimous Michael Winterbottom (Butterfly Kiss, Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo). He, at the outset, draws a circle around a diverse and disconnected group of Londoners (and periodically widens the circle to include countless anonymous …