Paul Schrader's Bressonian portrait of a high-priced Beverly Hills gigolo: adolescently admiring and envying, but never very informative or inventive. Less than halfway through the thing, the gigolo's professional life gives way to the more automatically plottable business of a murder frameup, with the gigolo's every step shadowed by unknown …
The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
Old-fashioned spook story, as well it ought to be, set as it is in the Eighteen Teens, and based on a documented case in Tennessee. Fumbling direction (by Courtney Solomon), crude shocks, and dull color shatter any illusion. With Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, Rachel Hurd-Wood, and James D'Arcy.
Mawkish and sledgehammering cycle-of-violence lesson around a high-school skinhead (Edward Furlong) and the older brother (Edward Norton) who has been his idol and mentor and who now comes out of prison a changed man. In flashback, Norton is afforded a broad platform and a lot of rope, and he spins …
An accordion-like compression of early rock-and-roll history, sociology, and mythology. This Memory Lane movie pushes a goodly number of nostalgia buttons, and it hopes that the subject matter and the fond feeling for that subject matter are alone sufficient to carry an audience along. It hopes, also, to camouflage the …
The title encapsulates a recipe for pretension, culminating in an endless eighteen-minute "ballet." (A Gershwin musical score could not be expected to impose some restraint.) Vincente Minnelli would further overreach himself, in the same general direction, in Lust for Life. With Gene Kelly (dazzling dancing and choreography), Leslie Caron (her …
Edward James Olmos's pet project (he directs it as well as stars in it), a moralizing, make-a-difference gang movie that depicts the cyclic hopelessness of life in the L.A. barrios. Ambitious in scope, it begins on the night of the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, skips to 1959, skips again …
Comic documentary, not quite a "mockumentary," about a marginal Milwaukee filmmaker by the name of Mark Borchardt (whose upper Midwest accent is suspiciously thicker than any in his immediate family), spurred by the regional cinema of Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to do his …
Hagiographic portrait of Jesse James, minus the ultimate martyrdom to bum you out. For the parched Western fan, staggering for months and years across the wasteland of the genre, it amounts to a canteen of sand. The first gorge-rising moment comes early, when pretty-boy Colin Farrell (the blackest brows since …
Horny-teenager update at the end of the millennium. Four buddies form a pact to lose their virginity by prom night: "No longer will our penises be flaccid and unused!" Moments of tastelessness intrude on stretches of mere insipidness. Chris Klein and Natasha Lyonne can do better for themselves, and already …
Rough and raw documentary by the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert: rough and raw in treatment as much as in subject. And highly educational, too, though it fails to provide a full answer to the innocent question of why pimps are necessary. The names of the garrulous participants are an …
Smooth, smug, half-smart. That description doesn't just fit Michael Douglas in the title role, but the movie as a whole, a retro romantic comedy that engineers a meet-cute (and a continuing date-cute) between the Democratic widower in the Oval Office and a married-to-career hatchet woman for an environmental lobby. ("I …
Knocking-kneed adaptation of the "controversial" novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Director and co-scriptwriter Mary Harron, keeping the story in the Reagan era (mobile phones as big as shoes), or in other words keeping it daintily at arm's length, wants to be double-sure that you know it's a satire -- as …
Heartfelt and personal but maudlin and awkward account of the maladjustment of a six-year-old Hungarian émigré in Eisenhower-era America. It gets off on a bad foot with some remedial first-person narration, corroborative newsreel footage, and a black-and-white flashback that arbitrarily turns to color after a quarter of an hour. It …