A lethargic on-the-lam thriller revolving around a blond nineteen-year-old Parisienne who, smitten by the dark lean chiselled Arabic good looks of a secretive stranger, stands by him after he takes part in a fatal bank robbery. Or rather, runs alongside him. To Spain, to Morocco, to Greece. Set in 1975 …
Martin Scorsese continues to suffer from a form of elephantiasis, compounded by a touch of Oscaritis: a pushing-three-hours epic on the tumultuous career of Howard Hughes (the eternally boyish Leonardo DiCaprio, deficient in gravitas even with the added mustache midway through) in the parallel worlds of filmmaking and aeronautics circa …
Raggedy-ass re-enactment of the making of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the 1971 blaxploitation blip by Melvin Van Peebles. There's certainly a behind-the-scenes story to tell (and writer-director-star Mario Van Peebles, Melvin's son, has a highly personal angle), but the slapdash dramatizations and pseudodocumentary interviews hardly help the credibility. With Rainn …
An Almodóvar paella of priestly pederasty, transvestitism, female impersonation, film, stage, assorted spices and savories. (Gael García Bernal in the persona of cabaret artiste Zahara looks strikingly like a blond Julia Roberts.) The presentation is polished and colorful as always; the onion-y layers of reality -- of fiction within fiction …
Comedy yields to homily in the face of avaricious developers. A socially conscious snore. With Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer; directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan.
Pretty, for sure, in Stuart Dryburgh's glossy photography. A parentless Vietnamese peasant, shunned in his picturesque village as "bui doi" ("less than dust," the term reserved for children of American fathers), tracks down his mother in the big city, where she works as a housemaid for an old crab who …
Richard Linklater's sequel to Before Sunrise, after a nine-year hiatus: not nearly as long as the twenty years between Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman and its sequel, just barely longer than the delay between Jacques Demy's Lola and his Model Shop. It seems appropriate to reference French forerunners …
Annette Bening takes to the role of an aging diva of the London stage, ca. 1938, like a starving lioness to a raw steak. Her range of expression is most impressive (whether suffering the attentions of a young admirer in an elevator or rising to the challenge of an ingenue …
Vanity film from Kevin Spacey, directing himself in the part of pop star Bobby Darin in a free-form, fantasy-riddled biopic, throwing in a gratuitious impression of Jerry Lewis in the bargain (not bad), and doing his own singing in a mellower, droopier, croonier style possibly more suited to a biography …
Anemic remake of an underrated adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. What was, in 1969, a sort of neo-James Cain hard-boiled thriller is now, under the direction of George Armitage (Miami Blues, Grosse Pointe Blank), a post-Tarantino, post-Get Shorty smarty-pants romp. And there is nothing to replace the sexual sparks …
The sophomore effort of director Jonathan Glazer, after his auspicious debut with Sexy Beast, is nothing if not ambitious: a reincarnation mystery wherein a somber little ten-year-old (Cameron Bright, the little creep of Godsend) shows up at the doorstep of a newly engaged widow (Nicole Kidman in a Peter Pan …
Third installment in the god-awful series about the preening and posturing vampire-hunter out of Marvel Comics. The previous installment at least had the curiosity of a slumming Guillermo del Toro at the helm. He, in the meantime, took his slumming elsewhere (Hellboy), leaving the scriptwriter of the first two installments, …
Do-gooder documentary, co-directed, co-written, and co-photographed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, focuses on eight children in the Calcutta red-light district. Their lives and prospects are as awful as you would imagine, and the film's image is as awful as you have come to expect in the DV era. (The …
The Bourne sequel. Admittedly, the basic premise of an amnesiac spy who remembers none of his assignments but all of his training is intrinsically ridiculous, internally illogical. (His unusual handicap -- groping along a fogbound Memory Lane -- never seems to slow him down, never lets his scheming adversaries get …
A case of ill-advised expansionism, not so much (or not just) in the sense of Renée Zellweger packing the pounds back on (without polishing up her English accent), but in the sense of a modestly profitable corner cookie store envisioning itself as the next Mrs. Fields. Granted, it's well within …