Exciting year, excruciating movie. Ernest (On Golden Scum) Thompson, directing for the first time in addition to writing, makes a characteristically shallow belly-flop onto deep thematic waters: Vietnam, the generation gap, long hair, LSD — that whole package. The finale — a funeral party turned protest march — is guaranteed …
Upwards of a dozen New Yorkers in destiny's dance on New Year's Eve, 1981. Flatly written comedy, and broadly acted in compensation. Wall-to-wall oldies. (It's an MTV Films co-production.) With Ben Affleck, Dave Chappelle, Janeane Garofalo, Kate Hudson, Courtney Love, Jay Mohr, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, Paul Rudd; written by …
The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel, and Ringo Starr in a video-taped rock fantasy. It looks a lot like a television variety show, with a flat, oddly colored image, and with studio sets and skits and musical numbers, but it is several lengths raunchier, and longer, than Dean Martin's weekly.
Low-budget "mockumentary" wherein an abrasive, facetious, blabbering would-be filmmaker by the name of Myles Berkowitz hits upon the idea of finally getting a film made by simply filming himself (or rather, videotaping himself) on a series of dates with women. And maybe as a bonus, falling in love. (Either that, …
Knowing that it doesn’t take a man to raise a man, single mom Annette Bening duly deputizes surrogate “daughters” Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning, assigning them the role of dual consigliere to look after her 15-year-old son (Lucas Jade Zumann). Once the fastidiously worded dual voice-over narration commences, the characters …
At last. After the "We're too old, but who cares?" middle-aged hijinks of The Hangover and the "We're too young, but who cares?" high-school hijinks of Project X, the Drunken Bromedy genre takes up the entirely age-appropriate collegiate hijinks of 21 and Over. Miles Teller plays the master-bantering mastermind, Skylar …
For those of us who have seen the trailer more times then they have their hand, I say it's about time this opened!
The first English-language feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu brings together disparate characters by the same matchmaking method of his Amores Perros: by car accident. Benicio Del Toro, a born-again ex-con, runs over the husband and two daughters of Naomi Watts, and the husband's heart is transplanted anonymously into …
An “update” to the ’80s television series, this time involving two high school polarities (the dumb jock and the smart geek) who are recruited for an undercover assignment to pose as high school students and infiltrate the supplier of a new “super drug.” The film is a pinball machine: loud, …
Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill advance from high school to college, while the overall level of humor plunges from ninth grade to third. I laughed once: the action momentarily trips over itself to deliver a sternly graphic anti-drug message before quickly returning to the business of trying to milk laughs …
Michael Winterbottom's re-creation of the Manchester pop scene from the mid-Seventies through the Eighties: i.e., from punk to rave. Breathless, chaotic, self-consciously "postmodern" -- which translates into raggedy, uneven visuals and a main character who addresses the camera with full knowledge of future events and full awareness that he's in …
A shared load of working-mother stress and pressure, not everyone's notion of moviegoing fun. Director Nancy Savoca (True Love, Dogfight, Household Saints) makes little personal movies about small-as-life people, mainly women, in small-as-life predicaments, almost as if she were operating in the field of the serious novel rather than the …