Albert Brooks's fourth directing job, his first in six years, with no apparent boost or wheel-greasing from his Oscar-nominated part in Broadcast News, and with no loss in modesty, either -- or integrity -- or funniness. The modest idea this time has to do with the tribunal that awaits every …
Murder investigation, overly contrived yet overly obvious -- a bad combination. Some intense pieces of acting, especially by Mary Beth Hurt as an immaculately manicured neat-freak and by Sheree North as a teenage porno actress's anguished mother, insufficiently comforted by Jesus. Less especially by Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard, that …
A sex scandal that topples a British M.P. of Leftish persuasion seems to be connected somehow to the death in mysterious circumstances of a black Borstal boy. Just how and where these are connected is a matter of some interest and suspense -- most intensely in the mechanical but well-oiled …
Workmanlike account of the untold (or anyhow unfilmed) true story of a 20th-century Moses and his two brothers, who sheltered hundreds of Jews from the Nazis in the forests of Belorussia, such dark days that color itself evidently went into hiding, leaving behind only a greeny or occasionally orangey residue. …
A little girl’s first Sex Education class raises questions in her mind about where she came from, and raises the word “penis” repeatedly to her lips. The answers take the form of a “mystery love story” in which her father recounts in flashback his entanglement with the three leading ladies …
This documentary from Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor focuses on five hospitals in northern Paris neighborhoods, revealing that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others.
Requires you to park your reason, along with your car, outside the theater. A ferry boat blows up in post-Katrina New Orleans, killing 543, mainly returning Navy men and their welcoming families; and the uncounted body of a young woman bearing residue from the explosion has been fished out of …
As tedious, as self-indulgent, as inert, as exasperating as the typical Henry Jaglom talkathon may be, at least we can feel the filmmaker is in his element. Here he is hopelessly over his head with the forces of destiny, the occult, eternal love. The repetitive semi-improvisatory delivery of lines, the …
Audrey Tautou brings her curious, wide-eyed beauty to a gentle portrait of grief after loss. We’re given plenty of time to loll in the perfect bliss of her romance with a handsome hunk before he dies, the better to grasp the numb paralysis that follows. The restoration that follows that …
From the filmmaking team of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, a vision of a cannibalistic future in a rust-colored Paris. The futurity opens the door to plenty of oddities besides the cannibalism and the monochrome. In fact nothing that's not odd gets in. (A flooded cellar crawling with snails and …
An oral history of a uniquely American institution as told by third- and fourth-generation counter-men and women. Delicatessens first began dotting the American landscape in the mid-1800s, the time of the great German immigration. At first a confederacy of Jews and Germans, the latter group was eventually replaced by Yiddish-speaking …
Buenos Aires bank employee Morán dreams up a scheme to liberate himself from corporate monotony: he’ll steal enough money to support a modest retirement, then confess and serve prison time while his co-worker holds on to the cash. Soon under pressure by a company investigator, accomplice Román heads to a …