Stage play in close-up (Stephen Metcalfe's Strange Snow -- and whoever retitled it gets an "F" in spelling), about a reunion of two Vietnam vets and the interest one of them takes in the other one's sister. (It's a different-worlds romance, joining the worlds of the grease monkey and the …

Girl meets girl with autism.

Brutally boring road movie revolving around a feckless karaoke singer (Jon Gries), his unbeneficial manager (Garrett Morris), and a sententious unseen narrator (Patrick Bauchau): "Observation and perception are two separate things." Mark and Michael Polish, the twin brothers responsible for Twin Falls, Idaho (co-writing it while Michael alone was directing …

"A Tom Cruise Production" —it's the first thing you see on the screen, and it's all there is to know. Here, he plays Jack Reacher, an invincible, invisible genius who appears out of the mists of cliche to investigate a rogue sniper's shooting spree. (The opening scene, in which a …

More like Jack Creaker, amirite? Yeah, it’s a lousy joke, but then, it’s a lousy movie, and lousy or not, it’s a propos: dated, silly, and more than a little bit cheap. Tom Cruise returns to his embodiment of a mid-century American masculine fantasy: an ex-military superman who’s gotta ramble, …

Disappointing, but only because it manages to raise hopes in the first place. Journeyman director Kenneth Branagh (Henry V, Thor) does his level best to give us a small-scale story with large-scale consequences — you know, characters we care about, a situation of some importance, and a few gadgets and …

In flight from a sexist boss and a philandering husband, Yvette Mimieux takes off cross-country in her Pacer, but loses her car in redneck country to two hitchhikers with an automatic handgun. For this indiscretion, the local police throw her in jail, and things go from bad to worse thereafter. …

Brusquely, bluntly, brutally "sensitive" film about a boy awakening to the existence of Real Monsters. A road-repair crew has put up "Danger" signs in front of the house; a pack of snarling dogs patrols the back; but mainly there's the gimp-legged neighbor nicknamed "the Zombie," who turns out to be …

A bag containing cholesterol-free, nutrient-dense seeds that have the power to change the world falls into the wrong hands. Fee-fi-ho-hum! All of the costumes, elaborate sets, lush cinematography (thank you, Newton Thomas Sigel!), and naturalistic use of depth don’t amount to a hill of beans in this giant time-slayer. Talk …

Vineeth Sreenivasan writes and directs this story of a successful businessman who winds up cheated and in debt, and must find a way back to prosperity and peace. In Malayalam.

No, it isn't a portrayal of the Biblical vision that Arnold Schoenberg had hoped to turn into an oratorio of the same name. The advance advertising campaign tried to make it look like a horror film, tried to hide the fact that it was actually a Vietnam film, tried (to …

Love among the international set, and among the floral bouquets, the lamps, the cushions, the Panavision rooms. The desirable remark about Once Is Not Enough would be, "It's too much." Alas, it only rarely reaches that extreme, although it is often in the act of stretching. It is told with …

An "evocation" of the boyhood of the late French filmmaker Jacques Demy, by his long-time wife and a very dissimilar filmmaker, Agnes Varda. The better you know Demy (some interspersed clips from his films are an inadequate introduction), the more open you will be to the charm and tenderness and …

Screenwriter Joe (Showgirls) Eszterhas follows his standard procedure of hiding a rudimentary, amateurish, nonsensical narrative behind a diversionary smokescreen of salaciousness: a flayed corpse, a collection of sex-partner pubic hair, an envelope of blackmail photos of the Governor of California in flagrante delicto, a beachfront love nest equipped with hidden …