A me-myself-and-I film, starring as well as written, directed, edited, and co-produced by Julie Davis (I Love You, Don't Touch Me). For all her outward independence (or anyway, lack of big-studio support), Davis adheres to the strictest conventions, a balmily optimistic romantic comedy that brings together two opposites, a "feminist …
Halfway serious romantic drama from director Luis Mandoki, the man who gave us the completely silly Message in a Bottle, about a one-of-the-guys policewoman (Jennifer Lopez) and an enigmatic, gray-overcoated loner who identifies himself as just "Catch": part-zombie, part-simpleton, part-Montgomery Clift (Jim Caviezel). The nonserious half would have to include …
Altman-esque ensemble piece co-written and co-directed by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, who, in addition, play a newly reunited Hollywood couple, a fading star (Leigh looking more like her father, Vic Morrow, with each passing year) and a sexually ambivalent British novelist and novice film director. Real-life mates Kevin …
Computer nerd's wet dream. In it, he's a pint-sized pretty boy (Ryan Phillippe) with golden curls, a permanent pout, a beautiful blond girlfriend and a beautiful brunette colleague -- take your pick. He has been recruited right out of college by Portland's counterpart to Bill Gates ("Bill who?"), a mop-haired, …
Imitation Jules Verne adventure yarn, spun from the Disney animation factory, about a pre-WWI expedition in search of the legendary sunken city. Sketchily drawn (in a deliberately retro style) and swiftly paced, but slowed down eventually by moral-mystical-political-anthropological grandiosity. With the voices of Michael J. Fox, James Garner, Cree Summer, …
Japanese animated space Western action film, set within but also slightly apart from the hit animated TV series, about a terrorist threatening to destroy the population of Mars via a deadly pathogen, and the bounty hunters hired to thwart the plot.
Writer-director John Singleton grabs the young African-American man by the shirtfront, and gives him a good shake: Grow up! Take responsibility! Be a man! The case-in-point narrative is short on development, long on naturalistic detail -- long on invective and expletive -- long on attitude and brutality -- just plain …
A crime-does-pay comedy, told in flashback, following the transparent bluff that the two bank robbers known as the Sleepover Bandits (Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton) have now been shot dead. Their getaway driver's sideline as a would-be Hollywood stuntman provides a dead giveaway to the "surprise" ending. Mid-spree, they pick …
Another controlled outpouring of lyricism, a dribble here, a splash there, from the maker of The Color of Paradise, Majid Majidi. The first half -- or more -- is filled with the sights and sounds of a construction site in urban Iran, with no gussying-up through photographic frill or musical …
Laundered biography of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and madman, John Forbes Nash, Jr. It's his madness, of course, and not his math, that makes him a viable screen subject, and director Ron Howard nurtures it with care. (And with more taste and restraint than are his custom.) But between the …
Contemporary war story about a U.S. Navy flier downed in the demilitarized zone of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the posse of Serbs hot on his heels, and the rescue effort thwarted by a NATO busybody of divided loyalties. (Opportunity, there, to reprise the wistful Vietnam refrain about taking the gloves off and untying …
Mawkish, mopish tale of a country bumpkin who comes to the big city and lands a job as a bicycle delivery boy: "Think of yourselves as the carrier pigeons of today." Think of it, for your part, as the Bicycle Thief of today. Except it's Chinese instead of Italian; and …
Voluble but otherwise artless provocation on the subject of a Jewish neo-Nazi. Ryan Gosling looks as if he is auditioning to play Timothy McVeigh, and acts as if he was studying De Niro's Travis Bickle and Max Cady in preparation. With Summer Phoenix, Billy Zane, Theresa Russell; written and directed …
Overlong, oversweet romantic comedy on the homosexual passions coursing through a culturally diverse, tolerant, tight-knit Montana paradise ("Can't you see what a good job God did here?"): the successful New York artist returned home to tend his ailing grandfather; the ex-jock Adonis for whom he has carried a torch since …
Faithful re-enactment of a 1993 incident in Somalia: the eighteen-hour urban firefight that ensues when an intended neat, clean, in-and-out raid into the heart of Mogadishu (colloquially called "the Mogue," or just "Mogue") goes bad. It delivers a mixed experience, even, you might say, a mixed message: harrowing yet spectacular …