Peace plan for feudal Japan: train an elite team of ten, eager, youthful assassins -- nine men and one fetching female in knee-high socks and thigh-length terry-cloth bathrobe -- to wipe out every warlord in the land. (As a final training exercise to prove their mettle, the ten are required …
The remake of The Bad News Bears, minus the definite article, plugs in Billy Bob Thornton in the Walter Matthau part, a former professional baseball player and current full-time drunk, enlisted to coach a team of Little League rejects (now sponsored not by Chico's Bail Bonds, though that establishment gets …
Rebecca Miller -- daughter of a dominating man, the playwright Arthur Miller -- has written and directed a coming-of-age tale about the daughter of a dominating man, a radical Sixties bitter-ender who, in the mid-Eighties, still lives in TV-free isolation at an abandoned commune on an island off the East …
Introductory lecture (Marian Seldes, the not overly familiar narrator) on the post-revolutionary Russian refugees who laid the foundation of modern ballet, namely the Ballet Russe and its warring spinoffs, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo vs. the Original Ballet Russe, Leonide Massine vs. Wasily de Basil (and companies). The supplementary …
With a new director (Christopher Nolan) and a new star (Christian Bale), the fifth entry in the Batman series, true to its title, returns to square one: how and why Bruce Wayne came to be Batman; the psychological root of his fixation on flying mammals; the part this played in …
Jacques Audiard's dishevelled remake of Fingers improves on James Toback's all-thumbs rendition. Not hard to do. The unglittering star, Romain Duris, is ugly-handsome in the Belmondo mold, his teeth barely fitting into his mouth; and he manages to make the protagonist — a man torn between a life of petty …
A homeless mutt fills the void in the life of a motherless girl, and knits together the townsfolk of Naomi, Florida. The maker of The Center of the World and Slam Dance might not be the man whom you'd choose to entrust with the care of your children. Then again, …
Forced, flat follow-up to Get Shorty, crudely directed by F. Gary Gray and coarsely photographed by Jeffrey L. Kimball, moving its base of operations from the film industry to the music business. John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance an encore to their number in Pulp Fiction. The Rock, stretching himself, …
Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, fresh from The Deep End, turn to a novel by Myla Goldberg. And on the evidence it's difficult to see how anyone could have thought there was a movie in it, even someone in the full flush of the spelling-bee documentary, Spellbound. Fictional spelling …
The enlistment of Nora Ephron, director and (with her sister Delia) cowriter, assures a level of smartness unexpected in a transplant from the small screen to the big. Not at all a reasonable facsimile of the Sixties sitcom about the witchy housewife with the twitchy nose, it is rather a …
Odyssey of a transvestite, self-christened Saint Kitten, from postwar Irish Catholic orphanhood to Swinging London in the Sixties and on through the Disco Daze into the Thatcher era. Cillian Murphy, speaking at the breathy top of his range, is so obnoxiously overconfident, dauntless, irrepressible, etc., as to not only renounce …
A Jane Austen-pattern fairy tale cut out of the gaudy fabric of a Bollywood musical. After pointlessly altering the first word of the familiar title, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach, Bend It Like Beckham) aggressively pushes the third word into the realm of race relations, as an Ugly …
Subpar Chabrol, a further cure for the mindless habit of affixing to his work the label of "a Chabrol thriller," let alone "a Hitchcockian thriller." Despite its origins (same as those of his La Cérémonie) in the oeuvre of the incomparable Ruth Rendell, it little resembles a thriller of any …
Here's fulfillment of any desire for a homosexual cowboy movie, superseding all those inadmissible innuendos as to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Cisco Kid and Pancho, et al. It fills out and plumps up a sketchy, skinny, yet ample short story by E. Annie …
Jim Jarmusch's mainstreamiest film to date has a lot of laughs in it, despite the pretentiousness of the cinéma d'ennui pacing and deliberately dissatisfying ending. Laughs are laughs, nonetheless, and once they've fought through the pretentiousness, they cannot be wiped off the scoreboard. (Another impediment to be fought through, another …