Ellen Burstyn, as the headstrong protagonist of the Margaret Laurence novel, reviewing her life at its end, hits many authentic notes but finds no one and nothing to harmonize with. And the dominating flashbacks of the first half, substituting Christine Horne as her younger self (well matched physically), shut her …
A hiatus of nine years since Kimberly Peirce’s first feature, the gender-bending Boys Don’t Cry, is practically like starting from scratch. And blended into a crowd of Iraq War films, this bring-the-troops-home agitation (“With all due respect, sir, fuck the President!”) is not designed to claim the same attention. The …
The debut of writer-director Bryan Bertino is a lowbrow (and low-blow) Funny Games, “inspired by true events,” centered on a romantically rocky young couple (so, don’t feel too bad for them, Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman: they were miserable already) terrorized by ghostly now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t masked intruders at an isolated summerhouse. The …
Director David Ayer, from an original story by James Ellroy, stages a dirty-cop mud wrestle, strident, obvious, hyperbolic, and hypocritical, one cop dirtier than another, one actor badder than another, making Dirty Harry look, in relation, like new-fallen snow and making Clint Eastwood look like God. The vodka-swigging, trigger-happy Keanu …
Seeing that the spaghetti Western owes a debt to the samurai film — Fistful of Dollars, anyway, owes a debt to Yojimbo — cult director Takashi Miike takes things an illogical step further: a Japanese takeoff on the Italian horse opera, with the actors speaking barely intelligible English. It’s a …
Three French siblings scattered around the globe (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, Jérémie Renier, in order of prominence on screen) must dispose of the valuable family estate, including a couple of Corots and Redons, after the sudden death of their seventy-five-year-old mother (Edith Scob, still elegant even if a long way …
Disorganized digital documentary on the nomadic Paskowitz family, eight boys, one girl, born on the road after their father, a twice-divorced Jewish doctor since remarried to a Mexican Indian, dropped out of conventional society in the late-Fifties to pursue his bliss: surfing, screwing, proselytizing. Then the children began to grow …
Neo-Capra political fable (the cusswords are a large part of the “neo-”) about a Regular Joe in Texico, New Mexico, who, through a Byzantine conspiracy of events, holds the single decisive vote in the Presidential election, subjecting him to round-the-clock media scrutiny and personalized campaigns from both parties. The shiftiness …
The erudite title, when pronounced correctly, is an obvious play, not to say a meaningful play, on Schenectady, New York, the main setting of the film, where a regional stage director of high pretension and acute hypochondria gets left behind by his wing-spreading painter wife and their young daughter, then …
Charmingly sincere fairy tale of forgiveness, revolving around a kingdom known for its soup, the dark days that befall it, and its truthful, fearless, chivalrous deliverer, an undersized mouse with oversized ears and ego. A magnificent cast if you could see them, if, that is, they weren’t hidden behind stiff …
First-time director, co-writer, and co-producer Helen Hunt confers a nice big fat role on Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt, at an age when roles of any size are fast drying up. (A do-it-yourself movie.) The forty-four-year-old leading lady portrays a thirty-nine-year-old teacher whose biological clock has started ticking loudly. In rapid …
Three-part anthology of fantastical short tales of small impact, set in the Japanese metropolis, two parts by French filmmakers (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax) and one by a Korean (Joon-ho Bong). They could be set anywhere. They could be shorter, too. The middle one by Carax is perhaps the most fully …
The directing debut of the screenwriter of American Beauty, Alan Ball, concerns itself, in a bland beige image, with the sexual experiences of an Arab-American eighth-grader in suburban Houston during the first Gulf War, and with little else. Sex and the Single-Minded Girl: pubic shaving, first period, girlie magazines, masturbation, …
Three best friends - Ricky, Bubbles, and Julian - live in a Nova Scotia trailer park and are always trying to make money, do drugs, and stick together.
Espionage interlaced with education. A range of Muslim beliefs and attitudes emerges in the course of an FBI crackdown on a terrorist network. Fiercely acted by all concerned (Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Neal McDonough, Jeff Daniels), but rather frivolously resolved, and the camera is prone to excitability at …