Chuan Lu’s epic about the 1937 Japanese conquest of Nanking, China, tries to do for that what Elem Klimov’s Come and See did for the Soviet-Nazi hell in Russia. In cold, ashen black-and-white, the panic, rapes, and atrocities pile up, along with some heroic Chinese resistance. Attempts to personalize this …
Bloated fantasy, set in a dark dank Nowheresville, further removed from the World As We Know It through the overuse of wide-angle lenses. A mad inventor -- isolated on a man-made floating island in the company of identical sextuplets, a matronly midget, and a disembodied brain inside a tank of …
Dead End Kids on Dead End Hill, high above the beaches of Rio, a boil-down of a Brazilian TV series. Any resemblance to City of God is not strictly incidental. (Fernando Meirelles, the director of that other City, worked as co-producer on this one, directed by Paulo Morelli.) The fashion-conscious …
A young musician from a small town in China tries to organize a charity rock concert.
The opening shot of a train entering a tunnel -- the sexual symbol that passeth no one's understanding -- does much to lower whatever expectations you can muster up for a late-period Fellini film. The subsequent spectacle of Marcello Mastroianni milling around at a radical feminist convention with the look …
Jamesian literary tale without the concentration, the ardor, the resonance: an Arab-American academic attempts to secure the co-operation of the family for a biography of a suicided one-book author in Uruguay. A James Ivory film post-Ismail Merchant (d.2005), but still with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to do the screenplay and Anthony …
Passable showcase for one of America's consistently funniest actors, Jack Palance. His role here is the rare intentionally funny one, as distinct from the gunslinger in Shane, let's say, or Castro in Che: a hard-bitten trail boss and honest-to-God Marlboro Man (striking a match for his ever-present cigarette across his …
The fact that this is a sequel doesn't help it to a faster start than its forerunner. It dilly-dallies for over half an hour in the Big City, introducing a new character (Billy Crystal's hapless younger brother Jon Lovitz, taking up a space vacated by Bruno Kirby), and establishing the …
John Travolta takes the part of a cocky, cynical personal-injury attorney ("I can appreciate the theatrical value of several dead kids") who cannot be shamed into pursuing a class-action suit against a small-town tanning factory and environmental polluter until he can connect the defendant to some deep pockets: Peter Pan …
A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Cailee Spaeny.
A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Cailee Spaeny.
A Western only by the technicality of its setting: California gold country, 1867. Michael Winterbottom, who earlier brought Jude the Obscure to the screen, takes the plot premise from Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, but most everything else from Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller: the jerry-built town, the brothel, the …
Costa-Gavras gives up politics for romance, a sort of guns-for-butter deal, and he appears to have gone into delirium from the sense of release. His script, from a Romain Gary novel, has a luxuriant, exhilarating quality, something like walking across mattresses, and the storyline, about two lost souls who literally …