A woman sets out to rescue her goddaughters from their wicked father, who intends to sell them into sexual slavery in order to cover his drug debts. Along the way, she gets help from a rich man, a Special Forces soldier, and quite possibly, God.
First time in the Middle East for a contented American working wife, now facing Empty Nest Syndrome with two children flown, planning to meet up with her husband in Cairo to see the pyramids together. The husband, a United Nations emissary overseeing a refugee camp in Gaza, is detained incommunicado …
The Academy has a long history of rewarding fetching troupers who consent to part from makeup and shampoo long enough to flagrantly play against type. Jennifer Aniston finds out the hard way that the road to Oscar is anything but a cakewalk. Unlike Charlize Theron, who quite literally transformed into …
A young baker moves from Berlin to Jerusalem in search of his late lover’s family only to end up playing semblant husband and father to the dead man’s widow and son. Credit first-time writer/director Ofir Raul Graizer with pulling off something of a miracle. Not only is the unorthodox premise …
The situation in Northern Ireland is pointed up none too undramatically: a Catholic youth, reluctantly drawn into terrorist activities, develops a yen for the Catholic widow of a Protestant policeman he himself had a hand in murdering. The very tentatively unfolding romance is your basic regimen of lending a hand …
Disneyfied recounting of the human-interest story (ca. 1999) about the matronly members of a Yorkshire Women's Institute who posed for a charity cheesecake calendar. An abundance of tittery comedy, but some darker tones, too, and nice plump roles for the capable Helen Mirren, Julie Walters, and others. Directed by Nigel …
This plays as part of the San Diego Latino Film Festival. According to their catalog, "Estela, a young girl living in Brazil during the mid-80’s, is struggling with adolescence and trying to understand sex, love, and friendships. Her only dream is to travel to California to visit her uncle Carlos, …
A young jazz buff from Chicago arrives by bus in a California beach town to "check out the scene," and he proceeds to make a spectacle of himself by speaking in the lingo and dressing in the style indigenous to the jazz buffs of Chicago, or to the jazz buffs …
Dark and mysterious New Girl in Malibu Chloe lures a trio of bright and shiny California kids into her dark and mysterious and just possibly dangerous world. The fun part is that, if you Google this film, the info box gives its title as Leashed, and the lead character's name …
A fine performance — and a good character — in search of a story. Silken-maned Robert Carlyle plays an aging former rocker, haunted by the death of his brother (his old band's frontman) and living in self-imposed exile on a farm in California. It's a tolerable, static, hidden sort of …
In the professional gamblers' circuit, from the Santa Anita track to the Reno casinos, Robert Altman has again selected a fortuitous stretch of terrain to survey. However, he seems unable to find much that interests or makes sense to him there, and he sweeps aside most of the gambling scene …
West Coast transplant of Plaza Suite is second-gear Neil Simon, a quartet of sketches allowing for a slew of Southern California jokes ("It's like paradise with a lobotomy") and moving progressively into lower and lower comedy. Simon is on his happiest level in the one with Maggie Smith as a …
History, sentiment, and inventiveness intertwine in this stylishly crafted love letter to the children of inventor Christopher Latham Sholes. You never forget your first. Mine was a beat up Royal originally owned by Millie, the young college student whose bedroom sat opposite me in the courtyard. For years, I fell …
The most cryptic credits on any movie ever. The dismissed director, Tinto Brass, is credited only with Principal Photography (not to be confused with Director of Photography), while the final Editing is attributed to an impersonal Kafkaesque entity identified as "the production." The script is proclaimed to be Adapted from …
Academy Award-winning former Bond girl Halle Berry wagers her reputation on a shameless "teen-in-trunk" exploitation drama, playing a veteran LAPD 911 operator plagued with guilt after her accidental redial alerts a killer to the victim’s whereabouts. Naturally, she gets a second shot at the same killer, and as implausible as …