Director Paul Schrader (or his boss) is anxious for you to understand that this parable of a present-day miracle worker, complete with stigmata, is meant to be funny. The winks and hints begin immediately, with a postmodern credits sequence of 1950s-ish drawings and mismatched typefaces, and they continue relentlessly by …
American exotica: a close-knit clan of con artists, of Irish descent, in the rural South. The movie doesn't spend long on the community itself; and the outside scams of the protagonist (Bill Paxton), though they claim your attention, are of more generalized, more generic interest. His affair of the heart …
The My Cousin Vinny director, Jonathan Lynn, returns to the courtroom, in quest of something other than truth and justice. Michael Richards is amusing enough as an unemployed actor obliged, for unswallowable reasons, to bluff his way through a Podunk criminal proceeding as an imposter defense attorney. (He exhibits no …
Francesco Rosi, working from a memoir by Primo Levi, recounts the reawakening to life, the reconciliation to life, of a Jewish Italian chemist on his roundabout journey homeward after his release from Auschwitz. Rosi trusts the audience to fill in the recent past without any graphic Schindler's List reminders. The …
Kiefer Sutherland's unambitious directing debut, a lamsters-and-hostages item ("Shut the fuck up!" "We're fucked!" etc.), overdependent on head shots. The complications are more than the novice can handle. (There's an undercover agent in the group: what's he waiting for?) The hardest thought seems to have gone into the selection of …
Cat and mouse, nip and tuck, ebb and flow, between a pixie-haired flight attendant and the "Lonely Hearts Strangler" on a near-empty Christmas Eve flight to LAX. Low-grade production with a couple of eye-opening effects of the landing gear clipping the tops of a hotel and a parking ramp. Ray …
Rude-boy comedy (drugs, drugs, drugs, "fuckin'," "fuckin'," "fuckin'," and so forth), set in Swansea, South Wales, with firm roots in British working-class realism. The tit-for-tat escalation of hostilities -- peeing on a karaoke singer, decapitating a poodle, and higher -- has no corresponding escalation of hilarity. In fact, the hilarity …
An export of the one-man regional cinema of Victor Nuñez. That region would of course be Florida (Gal Young 'Un, A Flash of Green, Ruby in Paradise), this time the swampy back country, with brief and reluctant excursions to the state penitentiary and the druggy depths of Orlando. The lead …
Glacial in pace, skeletal in plot, and generally nasty, Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is a repetitive nightmare of drear and dread punctuated by moments of queasy-making horror. Scarlett Johansson plays a blank but fetching piece of alien bait, trawling Scotland for solitary dudes that no one will miss, then …
Oliver Stone makes a stomach-lurching return to his worst Natural Born Killers style. Provided, that is, "style" can describe an indiscriminate hodgepodge of manic mannerisms from music videos, half-minute commercial spots (soft drinks, jeans), and "reality"-based TV shows (NYPD Blue, ER, et al.). Nowhere in his repertoire of cinematic hiccups, …
Final installment in novelist Roddy Doyle's "Barrytown Trilogy" (director Stephen Frears came on board with the middle one, The Snapper, in the wake of Alan Parker's The Commitments): two unemployed pals team up in a mobile fast-food enterprise, and learn the relative values of warm friendship and cold cash. High-spirited …
Shoot-from-the-hip political satire about a cooked-up conflict with innocuous Albania in order to deflect attention, two weeks ahead of the election, from a Presidential sex scandal. We briefly hear, never clearly see, the President himself; the principal players are his damage-control trouble-shooter (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin …
Christopher Guest, former member of Spinal Tap, goes off on his own to direct a mock documentary, as well as to play the lead role of Corky St. Clair, Broadway refugee, homosexual stereotype, and the creative mastermind behind the original musical revue in celebration of the sesquecentennial of Blaine, Mo., …
Agnieszka Holland's adaptation of the Henry James novel, already adapted in 1949 by William Wyler under the name of The Heiress. Or more accurately, Wyler's was an adaptation of a stage-play adaptation under that name. The older one, all in all, was more of a movie, but Holland, having spent …