Time-travel fantasy, with the bare minimum of snags and snarls in logic. A struggling London actor (Douglas Henshall), self-described as a "Marlon fucking Brando," sincerely regrets the infidelity and confession thereof -- the confession perhaps a bit more than the infidelity -- that came between him and his girlfriend of …
A weirdie, co-written by Michael and Mark Polish, directed by only Michael, about the warming relationship of a heart-of-gold hooker and one half of a set of Siamese twins (the merely identical Polishes, who look and act a bit like Adam Sandler on Valium). The twins' synchronized movements and conspiratorial …
Classmates at Tehran U., one from a small town, the other from the big city. The brighter student, the small towner, is forced into strangling wedlock, while the other is free to follow her dreams (and drop out of the movie). Rudimentary feminism, mundane, flat, monotonous in presentation. Directed by …
The farmer takes a housekeeper. A pretty one, too, in a feline kind of way. And she drives a wedge between this illiterate, celibate Swede and his best friend, a young Americophile with a rock-and-roller's pompadour and a two-toned convertible. Essentially a three-character piece, heavy on closeups, slow-moving, almost inert. …
Nice idea to set a women's picture in and around a beauty salon. And nice amount of attention to the utopian ambience thereat, the assorted products and treatments, and the relations among staff and clientele. (An aging Bulle Ogier, immaculately groomed, makes a perfect proprietress.) But the heroine's personal story …
In the eye of Typhoon Leiah, a salvage boat happens onto a derelict satellite-tracking ship, worth $300 million to its Russian owners, or one-tenth of that to its salvagers. Trouble is, there's an alien life form on board, infesting the mainframe computer, assembling a battalion of robots, and steadily whittling …
Madame Bovary on the Borscht Belt, a Jewish housewife in a dalliance with the travelling "blouse man." (For a touch of authenticity, Mal Z. Lawrence has a cameo as the obligatory stand-up comic.) An inconsequential little domestic tempest, set amid the momentous events of the summer of '69: Woodstock and …
The directorial debut of Tim Roth (thoroughly concealed behind the camera), a somber drama of sexual abuse in an isolated, stark, whitewashed country house on the Devonshire coast. It would be easy to tally up some anti-Hollywood points: the bad complexion on the introverted younger brother who wants to put …
Pleasant diversion from Japan (the title is itself a diversion), about a live radio drama undergoing radical rewrites right before, and all throughout, its broadcast, at the whims of its temperamental cast. Masahiko Nishimura is especially funny as the spineless producer, and Kyoka Suzuki is not far behind as the …
Just another megabudgeted plunder of an innocent inoffensive little TV series. The series, dating from the late Sixties when spy spoofs and Westerns were both thick on the ground, seemed a sensible and even slightly ingenious hybrid. The movie, on the other hand, comes in the midst of a long …
Unmistakably Abbas Kiarostami: another winding dusty mountain road, another remote village, another desultory quest. And all the accustomed austerity and rigidity of treatment, too. The "cover" story of the interloper from Tehran (like any Kiarostami protagonist, a total abstainer from smiles and laughter) is that he is on an archaeological …
Futuristic juvenilia in the mode of early Heinlein. It tells of the desperate mission of the Diligent to hook up with the Tiger Claw out in the Vega Sector to thwart the Kilrathi threat to Earth space from the Charybdis Quasar. Or something. In essence, a big-screen computer game of …
A well-made play, made, or rather remade, into a well-made movie. Beautifully "read," beautifully dressed and accoutered, beautifully carpentered and upholstered, beautifully photographed. It seems to be the standard critical response to raise an eyebrow of surprise over the incongruity of American dramatist and filmmaker David Mamet settling himself into …
Agent 007, for a change, gets a "real" director, Michael Apted, which is to say a director with some creditable credits to his name, Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorky Park, the documentary 28 Up. But what's the use when he's still to be held to a formula requirement like the ever …