Those living under the Damoclean sword of at-will employment will no doubt find film-buyer Jeon Manhee’s (Kim Min-hee) dismissal without cause easier to accept than her request for a parting selfie with her boss. But that’s nothing compared to the bafflement audiences will experience when confronted with the subsequent story’s …
For its mountain-lake summer-resort setting, this is the most bracing -- climatically if not intellectually -- of Eric Rohmer's even-tempered Contes Moraux. Other material assets are a couple of dusky-complexioned actresses: a skinny, wiry-haired adolescent and a mature, handsome woman novelist who gets an aesthetic pleasure out of the sentimental …
Soap opera with a Jamaican patois — that of the black housekeeper in a fractured, then broken, Baltimore home. The housekeeper herself, notwithstanding a deep dark secret, is too good to be true: supremely self-possessed, wryly patronizing, witty, wise, and Whoopi Goldberg. But the Only Child of the household (since …
An "experienced" woman tries to settle down to conjugal contentment with a Monterey fisherman, but is cruelly tempted toward a new, extramarital experience. Sordid domestic drama, with a whole-souled belief in man's capacity to sink to the level of beasts (and below), from a couple of long-time castigators of the …
Any remake would have been hard put to be worse than the laughable original of 1981, and the latest CGI technology, with or without the augmentative 3-D (added as an afterthought in the laboratory), oughtn’t to have had too impossible a job of improving upon the herky-jerky stop-motion monsters of …
Free adaptation of François Bégaudeau’s nonfiction chronicle of a single year of teaching French, or trying to teach it, to a group of restive fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds at a melting-pot public school in a rough district of Paris. Bégaudeau essentially — and needless to say, convincingly — plays himself on …
Early and incontestably minor work by Claude Sautet, a good, solid, serious, straightforward, fatalistic crime thriller that gives little hint of the glories of his peak period in the Seventies. All the same, it can lay claim to some fine qualities: a fast-start robbery in broad daylight, open air, and …
Abysmal exploitation film begins somewhere in the area of The Blackboard Jungle (but a bit deeper into the jungle: every square inch of Abraham Lincoln High has been spray-painted with graffiti, and metal-detectors have been installed at the entrances to ensure that the students leave their guns and switchblades at …
Mark Lester's revised forecast of the educational future, an escalation of his Class of 1984, with a Free Fire Zone around the school, and robot teachers inside (programmed to deal harshly with disciplinary problems). The "relevance" of this vision fades in a hurry once the teachers emerge as the chief …
The pupils at a high school next to a nuclear power plant start acting and looking strange after buying contaminated drugs from a plant worker. Directed by Lloyd Kaufman and Richard W. Haines.
The meteoric rise and dramatic fall of Claymation innovator and California Raisins animator Will Vinton, whose studio revolutionized the animation business during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. But after 30 years of being the king of clay, Vinton’s carefully sculpted American dream came crumbling down after an unfortunate association with …