British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, in the vein of his docudrama Bloody Sunday, has done a thoroughgoing job of imagining how the events of 9/11 might have unfolded, a much more thorough job of it than most mere newspaper readers and TV news watchers will have done for themselves; and he …
The title figure of this documentary by Rupert Murray does not remain unknown for long. His name is Douglas Bruce, a Brit living "a great life" in Lower Manhattan, unaccountably diagnosed with retrograde amnesia, "the rarest kind of amnesia," a total wipeout of the past. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless …
Giuseppe Tornatore’s uncharacteristic stab at a giallo, an erotic thriller Italian-style, or, as the genre was ingenuously known in its Sixties and Seventies heyday, a “sexy-thrilling.” The film begins in a fog of intrigue — a comely Ukrainian immigrant, bedevilled by brief, almost subliminal flashes of flesh and rope, worming …
Romantic deception from the French farceur, Francis Veber: a paparazzi photo captures a lowly parking valet in the same frame with a philandering industrialist and his supermodel girlfriend, and the industrialist then pays the valet to pretend that the supermodel is his own girlfriend. The mechanical plot is worth putting …
An abortive Pygmalion tale, written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell, about a septuagenarian one-time matinee idol ("You're famous?" "A little bit") who takes an interest in the hopeless would-be model and, in the meantime, ill-natured caregiver for her gay great-uncle, an old thespian crony of our Pygmalion …
Comic-book adaptation, or "graphic-novel" adaptation, about an avenging superhero hidden behind the stiff grin of a Guy Fawkes mask: a kind of Frankensteinian composite pieced together of Zorro (the black hat and cape, the revolutionary politics, the carving of his initial on his handiwork), Blade (the adeptness with cutlery, the …
Folklorish Mexican film of timeless, endless oppression and rebellion, wherein a one-handed old peasant violinist tries to trick some relatively decent, human, occupying soldiers, and gets tricked in turn. Shot in high-contrast, neo-neorealist black-and-white, looking quite like another era, post-WWII, let’s say. The beautifully framed, discreet torture scene at the …
Almodóvar adds to his familiar sour comedy and mock melodrama the new element of an apparent apparition, a mundane ghost, a flatulent phantom, blended in with the familiar elements in uncertain tone. He shows nary a trace of the erstwhile "bad boy," nothing now but a good, good boy, devoted …
Actor Richard E. Grant's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film, set in Swaziland on the verge of its independence, but centering on his messy domestic situation, his cheating mother, his boozing father, and his unceremonious American stepmother, "a common little ex-air hostess." (The title comes from her mimicry of Brit speech affectations.) It …
Deep waste. The ex-con father of a kidnapped boy cannot very well go to the cops after he has shot two of the kidnappers on a public street; the gold-hearted hooker who took part in the kidnapping, but who really dreams of another life on a quiet Mexican beach, will …
Larry (Kids) Clark has found his subject (kids) and isn't looking for another. This time, with a bit less of a shock factor and even more of a boredom factor, it's a tight-pantsed gang of seven Hispanic skateboarders in South Central L.A. -- an Unmagnificent Seven of unexceptional skills, including …
Triumph-over-tragedy true story about the resurrection from literal ashes -- a 1970 plane crash -- of the Marshall University football team, the Thundering Herd, in the small West Virginia steel town of Huntington. A golden opportunity, obviously, for filmmaker McG (Charlie's Angels and its sequel) to expand his heart if …
Simon West's remake of a decent little well-structured somber thriller, vintage 1979, indecently increases the budget, the scale, the affluence, and the sound effects, while dragging things out interminably and destroying the structure. Camilla Belle, Brian Geraghty, Katie Cassidy, Clark Gregg.
Documentarist Chris Paine investigates the automotive murder, and finds, as in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, many bloody hands: the oil industry, the car companies, the federal government, the consumer, et al. Essentially this is in the nature of a TV news-magazine talking-head report, and it doesn't do …