First-time director and cinematographer (rare combination) Shona Auerbach builds a façade of realism over an interior of mush. The title figure (Jack McElhone) is a nine-year-old deaf boy who never speaks, yet narrates the action (in an all but unintelligible Scots accent) in the form of letters to his absent …
Cynical piece of Christmas capitalism concerning a cynical con man who, sentenced to one year of steady nine-to-five employment, lands a postal job in the Dead Letter Office and starts to answer God's mail. The con man predictably regains some idealism. The filmmaker, Garry Marshall, no less predictably retains his …
Forced comedy-mystery about a lady police detective investigating a series of murders in which the victims are stabbed in the back with identical awls and promptly respond to their wounds by dribbling identical blood down their chins. The mere idea of a female detective is not such a surefire delight …
Wartime romance beginning in the spring of 2001 (you know what’s coming) and stretching up to the present, staggeringly basic and banal in its specifics, turning on a senseless withholding of information for the sole purpose of contrived misunderstanding and revealed nobility. It issues from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, …
This story of a blackface Halloween kegger-party at a fictional, racially divided university generates enough fertile insight to keep the heaps of dialogue compostable to the point where it helps to cover some of the script’s more familiar dirt. Justin Simien’s caustic attack on Ivy League racism frequently finds characters …
Roman Polanski comes as close here to his avowed ideal of the one-character movie as he has come since his feature debut, Knife in the Water: three characters. His third feature, Cul-de-Sac, came close also, and the isolated seaside surroundings of this one, coupled with Ben Kingsley's shaven pate (almost …
The title is too harsh. The comedy doesn't die, it just labors, as a funeral at a country estate turns to fiasco and farce, beginning with the delivery of the wrong cadaver and escalating with a bottle of mislabelled hallucinogens. Matthew MacFadyen, Keeley Hawes, Alan Tudyk, Daisy Donovan, Rupert Graves, …
The American remake, a scant three years after the British version, is tantamount to a summer-stock production in Cleveland, a black comedy made over into a black comedy, or more distinctly a dark comedy made over into an African-American comedy. Beyond the casting of Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, …
Elixir-of-life fantasy about the rivalry between an aging actress and best-selling dietician. There's something Twilight Zone-y about the blend of black comedy and Sunday sermon, as well as about the anecdotal narrative. There is nothing Twilight Zone-y about the Silly Putty special effects -- as costly and seamless as they …
How, with that attitude, did the filmmakers finish their work without falling on their bayonets? Fred Dryer, the former football player, makes a reasonable economy model of Clint Eastwood (not economy-sized, though), with a face carved by hatchet and a simmering sense of menace. But even Eastwood would be no …
Two adrenaline junkie stuntmen (John Hargreaves and Grant Page) accept a suicide mission to infiltrate and destroy the seemingly impenetrable fortress of a notorious Filipino racketeer.
In writer-director Jason Lei Howden, Peter Jackson may have found a cinematic heir — at least to his patrimony of New Zealand–based, late-’80s gross-out horror-comedy. Sad metalhead Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) loves bands like Cannibal Corpse because “when life sucks and you feel alone and empty, you feel better because someone …