Mythologizing documentary, although not much of a recruiting film for the agnostic, on the scurrilous poet, novelist, postal worker, boozer, and cult hero, Henry Charles ("Hank") Bukowski, pieced together out of testimonials from friends and admirers (Taylor Hackford, Tom Waits, Sean Penn, Bono, et al.) and candid footage of the …
A baseball comedy about life in the lowly Carolina League. Some of the sidelong glances at ballpark ambience are perhaps (just about) enough to get on the good side of any fan of the sport. But scriptwriter and first-time director Ron Shelton doesn't do much to flesh out the various …
Gary Busey, who looks to be a credible enough roughneck, is asked instead to be another boringly invincible One Man Army. (He keeps a Mason jar of bullets he's dug out of his own flesh: thirty-nine by actual count.) The supporting cast has been assembled with a certain regard for …
Facetious hard-boiled romantic thriller about the percolating passion between an Angst-ridden celibate hitman, Anthony LaPaglia, and his fatalistic target, Mimi Rogers (amused, amusing). You can see the ending coming miles away, and you go slower and slower the closer you get. A couple of warmish woman-on-top sex bits. With Matt …
Hong Kong action hero Chow Yun-Fat is required to share honors and screen time with the crinkled brow and lopsided smirk of Seann William Scott (American Pie), as a New York pickpocket who learned his martial artistry by projecting and mimicking kung-fu movies in a Chinatown grindhouse. ("The most undisciplined …
A vampire masquerades as a priest in this locally produced horror comedy. This took home the Best Guerrilla Feature award at the 2015 Temecula Independent Film Festival.
Woody Allen's continued exploration of his beloved New York: the mythical past of Roaring Twenties speakeasies, the Broadway of Ziegfeld and O'Neill, the chorus girls, the Lost Generation café intellectuals, all that. New territory, for him. Once over lightly. For all its frothiness, though, it nonetheless gnaws on the Big …
A bullet rips through the heart of two studio logos, announcing the return of Walter Hill to the genre that brought him fame, the action comedy. Sylvester Stallone and Sung Kang perform a nifty reversal on the characters Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy played in Hill's 48 Hrs. With a …
Brad Pitt hinted recently that he may be making an early exit from acting. If that means no more Bullet Trains — easily the wormiest script he’s hitched his star to since Mr. and Mrs. Smith — I’ll hold the door for him. Pitt stars as a career hitman suddenly …
It struggled to get a PG-13 rating because of some f-words, and Lee Hirsch's documentary about vulnerable kids bullied in schools (and their sometimes woefully inadequate official guardians) has no shaping style. But if it bullies home its points a little, those points need to be made, and the victims …