Call-to-action documentary by Louie Psihoyos, rather like a magnified detail from The End of the Line, a tight focus on a “little town with a really big secret,” the Japanese fishing port of Taiji, where an estimated twenty-three thousand dolphins and porpoises are covertly slaughtered every year. Upon his return …
Gene Kelly made his first big Technicolor splash while on loan to Columbia for this Rita Hayworth vehicle. It marks the first partnering of Kelly and then choreographer Stanley Donen. (The two would later collaborate on such M-G-M musical milestones as On the Town and It's Always Fair Weather.) Director …
Japanese animated space Western action film, set within but also slightly apart from the hit animated TV series, about a terrorist threatening to destroy the population of Mars via a deadly pathogen, and the bounty hunters hired to thwart the plot.
Borrowing both its title and premise from a pair of John Wayne movies, director Thomas Bidegain’s update of The Searchers swaps out the Comanche for Islamists as a vengeful father (François Damiens) goes in quest of a daughter who’s disappeared with her Arab boyfriend. It isn’t until Dad hits Antwerp …
A dud. The big team of writers pile up cheap violence, icky aliens, corny rustics, a ha-ha Mexican, a mystery woman reborn in a fire, a hummingbird, a boy and his dog, silly special effects, and a sense that both the Western and the sci-fi invasion genre are being buried …
A plotline copied from straight-faced action films like Coogan's Bluff and Trackdown (a bit more Trackdown, but in the setting of Coogan's Bluff); a trendy soirée appropriated from Midnight Cowboy; a standard collection of hicks-in-the-city jokes: ordering a meal at the Waldorf ("You got any Popsicles?") and causing the cellist …
A long-dead woman comes back to life in a river full of dead fish and transforms the life of her dysfunctional family. Directed by Francisca Alegría, starring Benjamin Soto, Enzo Ferrada Rosati, Leonor Varela, and Mía Maestro.
A mike-frightened would-be songwriter from South Amboy, N.J., moves to Manhattan to pursue her dream among the bumping-and-grinding female bartenders (like exotic dancers without the clothing removal) of the titular nightspot. Flashy, empty puffery. With Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello, Melanie Lynskey, John Goodman, LeAnn Rimes; directed by David …
Drugs, gang war, diminished academic performance -- the whole sordid scene, with a cinematic style to match it. Top-billed Jim Brown waits in the wings for half the movie before making his grand entrance: "This is my bitch. I don't want you fuckin' around with her." Cheryl Kay, Gregg Gomez …
Another indigestible mix of martial arts and hip-hop, the special niche that cinematographer-turned-director Andrzej Bartkowiak has carved out 4 himself. (In exactly what way, except of course 4 money and power, is it better 2 be the director of Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds than 2 be the photographer …
Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …
The new girl in school, revealing an ability to stand a pencil on its point, completes the circle of an extracurricular coven. An "empowerment" fantasy, for feminist teens in particular. But power corrupts, doesn't it? The inevitable falling-out (with the tranquilized Robin Tunney representing Good, the flamboyant Fairuza Balk representing …