Slow-going psychological thriller about an unpublished novelist who, in search of material, insinuates himself into the life of a paroled mass murderer. Lou Diamond Phillips wrote the screenplay with himself in mind as the star, and there is a facileness, a routineness about the writing. But not about the performance …
Punishingly dull biopic on history's most fabled aviatrix, Amelia Earhart (portrayed by Hilary Swank, with traces of Katharine Hepburn rather than of Kansas wheatfields in her speech), her final flight endlessly interrupted by how-she-got-there flashbacks. The only suspense is in whether the film is going to offer an ending or …
Cutesy art-house item looks at the world (at Paris, more precisely) through the primrose-colored glasses of Jean-Pierre Jeunet: a delayed-meeting romance à la And Now My Love, Sleepless in Seattle, et al., and a fashionable juggling act of fate, chance, coincidence, etc. The dementedly winsome heroine (Audrey Tatou), prone to …
Cutesy art-house item looks at the world (at Paris, more precisely) through the primrose-colored glasses of Jean-Pierre Jeunet: a delayed-meeting romance à la And Now My Love, Sleepless in Seattle, et al., and a fashionable juggling act of fate, chance, coincidence, etc. The dementedly winsome heroine (Audrey Tatou), prone to …
Costa-Gavras's valuable addition to the Holocaust canon. As an adaptation of The Deputy -- Rolf Hochhuth's pedagogical stage play of forty years earlier, and a hotly controversial one at the time in pointing an accusatory finger at the Catholic Church, among others, for complicity or at least acquiescence in the …
George Clooney, sole American in the cast, has been enrolled to glamorize further the most glamorous profession, to go by Hollywood, in the world today: the high-end assassin. (Vampire is not a profession.) Director Anton Corbijn, a former music-video guy, places him in existential exile amid the Medieval townscapes and …
Sci-fi musical in black-and-white, written and directed by Cory McAbee, who also stars.
A mainstreamy, sitcommy version of Happiness, awash in splashy, trashy plot turns. Any movie whose opening line features a sulky teenage girl (in a grainy video image, but never mind that) saying directly into a camcorder, "I need a father who's a role model, not some horny geek-boy who's gonna …
Proficient "reading" of an early Mamet play with three speaking parts, an oblique examination of the pettiness of petty crooks. Flavorful; salty; but dry, very dry. With Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Franz, and Sean Nelson; directed by Michael Corrente.
Barbara Kopple re-enters the arena of her admirable Harlan County, U.S.A., that of the labor dispute. But she has not just repeated herself. The laborers this time are meatpackers instead of mine workers, but more significantly the time itself has moved on into the mid-1980s, the era of Reaganomics, and …
An Ohio housewife (Jobeth Williams) dashes off 2000 words in the style of the "Rebecca Ryan" series of suspense novels, and takes first prize in a writing contest. Her reward is a trip to Paris, with an unexpected bonus of a bump on the head in a traffic accident. When …
Spongy satire divides its feeble forces between the Bush Administration (à clef) and the TV talent contest, American Idol, aligning the two targets when the mush-brained President agrees to appear as a guest judge on the season finale, a showdown pitting a "white-trash girl from Ohio" against an undercover Iraqi …
Steve Tesich, who wrote Breaking Away, is back in the bicycle seat again. Two estranged brothers, one a prosperous doctor, the other a med-school dropout, join up for their first bicycle race together. And their last: one of them is dying of cerebral aneurysm. The race -- billed as Hell …
Pulp thriller version of the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, based on the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, and directed by Wim Wenders. On one level, it's a withering critique of the male camaraderie ethic (with friends like this, who needs enemies?). On another, it's a conventional underworld adventure refreshingly infused with …
Formula underworld drama poured into an epic template. Like Jiffy-brand waffle batter spread over an iron the size of a billiard table. "Based on a true story," it traces, in separate intertwined storylines, the converging upward paths of criminal and cop: the former (Denzel Washington) starting out as the servile …