David Riker's black-and-white vignettes on Latin American immigrants in New York: thin slices of neo-neo-realism, smothered in a gloppy gravy. Sincere but awkward.
Another invisibly etched documentary — this one clocking in at a platter-bowing 272 minutes — in which the king of all non-fiction filmmakers, Frederick Wiseman, once again proves himself worthy of the title. (The antithesis of the celebrity documentarian, Wiseman never once crosses paths with the camera.) This time around, …
In an inexplicable street-corner shootout between a cop and a probationer, a stray bullet hits a six-year-old child and (in a poetic turn of phrase) it keeps travelling -- up and up through the New York City power structure. A foursome of wordy screenwriters -- Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, Nicholas …
Amiable domestic comedy about a nuclear blue-collar family in which everyone’s got a secret, and one’s got several. Writer and director Raymond De Felitta orchestrates some lively passages of household discord, and he has set the action in a flavorful locale, a New England-y “fishing village” in the middle of …
Chaplin scrambles to some of his highest peaks — dancing in the boxing ring, carousing woozily in a nightclub — for the love of a girl who sells flowers on streetcorners, and who is blind, and who is beautiful.
Although it buries the acknowledgment deep in the closing credits and has changed its name in hopes of establishing a separate identity, this is more or less a remake of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, a crest in the current wave of angelmania. A full-color remake, to be sure, and …
Inspired by true events, City of Dreams follows Jesús, a young Mexican boy whose dreams of becoming a soccer star are shattered when he’s trafficked across the border and sold to a sweatshop making fast fashion in downtown Los Angeles. Thrust into a world of exploitation and despair; he’s forced …
Post-apocalyptic children’s film, sufficiently dark for any full-bloom pessimist, about the remnants of humanity in a run-down underground city, and the two teenagers in search of an exit. Impressive physical production (Terry Gilliam at his greediest could not have asked for more), though the escape route gets a bit theme-parky. …
An important story that loses something in the telling. There is, admittedly, something shocking in saying that a documentary which includes footage of a man being executed via crucifixion lacks any kind of immediacy and/or viscerality. (To say nothing of the shock involved in seeing such a thing at all.) …
A slice of "kinetic" cinema (or what would be called "hyperactive" if it were a child) that grabs you by the shirt collar and shakes the living daylights out of you: an antsy camera, fast-motion, split-screen, yellow flashbacks, a loop-the-loop storyline that keeps circling back on itself, a tangential digression, …
The Gold of the title is Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize–winning populist food critic for the L.A. Times. The city is Los Angeles, a place that is, in Gold’s words, “less a melting pot than a great, glittering mosaic” whose multitudinous urban centers boast an even more multitudinous array of restaurants, …
A look into the urban snake pit. What writer and director John Sayles (also editor, also bit-player) sees down there is a lot of writhing and slithering, or at any rate a lot of intertwined storylines and mobile, long-take camerawork. The latter puts a long leash on the actors, including …
Basic, bare-bones crime film about a double-crossed jewel thief with a score to settle ("I'm my own police"). John Irvin's no-nonsense direction is a little short of style (the credits sequence -- grainy black-and-white imagery of the snaky lines of L.A. freeways -- raises false expectations), but it pushes the …
An all but unbeatable tsk movie from Roland Joffé. (Shot of a cart-pulling beast of burden with its ribs showing through its hide. Tsk. Shot of a noseless leper. Tsk.) A crane-powered consciousness-raising project about the slums of Calcutta, it steers clear of the spiritual content of the story (taken …