American independent film from writer-director Todd Solondz. The subject matter alone -- the daily diet of torture and torment endured by a junior-high-school pariah -- hardly marks it as boldly independent in spirit: the underdog is as prized a figure in the mainstream as anywhere else. Other aspects of it …
Sapphism Made Simple. Camille, the uptight Mythology prof at a strict Christian college, has a dilemma: affections divided between a stodgy theologian on the faculty (her unofficial fiancé) and a dusky-skinned, lesbian magician whom she meets at the laundromat and who speaks to her in a whole new way: "Camille, …
A romantic comedy of misunderstanding: the token-taker has an unspoken crush on a daily commuter, rescues him from an onrushing el train after a mugging, and is mistaken for his fiancé as he lies comatose in the hospital. Then she meets his brother. A possible premise, drudgingly written, directed, and …
Written by Miyazaki, but directed by Yoshifumi Kondō, the man Ghibli hoped would become his successor. Death intervened.
Written by Miyazaki, but directed by Yoshifumi Kondō, the man Ghibli hoped would become his successor. Death intervened.
A real-time movie, and a somewhat dragging-time movie. It's one hour, twenty-eight minutes, thirty seconds to New Year in Tehran, and we set off with a frowny seven-year-old girl on her all-consuming quest for the perfect goldfish (chubby, not skinny) as the traditional decoration. The difficulties are more exasperating than …
Writer-director Desmond Nakano sets up an alternate world, a bit less radical than the re-evolved world of Planet of the Apes, in which blacks are on top and whites on the bottom. It's an attempt to make old, familiar lessons new and fresh again, but they're elementary lessons all the …
Your basic concert film padded out with offstage interviews and glimpses of preparations and rehearsals. The only novelty, a novelty indeed, is the event itself, an annual outdoor festival in New York City of (if difficult distinctions can be made) female impersonators, transvestites, transsexuals, "pre-ops," and others. Filmmaker Barry Shils, …
Walter Hill has gone to considerable lengths to make Westerns, putting them in modern dress (Extreme Prejudice) and even in the garb of other genres entirely (The Driver, The Warriors, Streets of Fire, Trespass), but in a sense he has never prior to this one gone to greater lengths. Never, …
A British black comedy with a lightness of touch, though not of shade, and with a Heavenly Creatures sort of cheekiness about a case of True Crime. It languishes a bit during the psychopathic hero's rehabilitation and never fully recovers during his relapse, but the cartoonishly uncomplicated face of Hugh …