American documentary on French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida: at home, at conferences, in classrooms, in interviews. With all the unavoidable distractions of the image, the film is less useful as a means of appreciating Derrida's thought than of appreciating his photogenic handsomeness: corona of white hair, nut-brown skin, a lived-in face, …
Alongside Akira Kurosawa's customarily virile athletic work, this slow, contemplative movie is apt to be seen all the more clearly as an old man's movie, a movie made with a reduced pulse rate and a tenacious, almost desperate attempt to savor every passing moment. At bottom, it is a My …
Alexander Payne’s film is on Hawaiian time and floats well below his Sideways. George Clooney is the rich Honolulu lawyer whose faithless wife has crashed into a coma. He is also trustee for a huge patch of Kauai that excites his greedy relatives and his wife’s lover. His trip with …
Grueling and gruesome British-made horror film about six women friends (plenty for sacrifice), out for adventure, who enter an uncharted Appalachian cavern ("If there's no risk, what's the point?") and encounter a subterranean tribe of omnivores. Director Neil Marshall, straight-faced, businesslike, unpretentious, had a real movie going -- a movie …
Grueling and gruesome British-made horror film about six women friends (plenty for sacrifice), out for adventure, who enter an uncharted Appalachian cavern ("If there's no risk, what's the point?") and encounter a subterranean tribe of omnivores. Director Neil Marshall, straight-faced, businesslike, unpretentious, had a real movie going -- a movie …
A photographer on a road trip across the American Southwest is thrust into the nihilistic underbelly of America and drags his wife and a shady private detective down into this nightmare world with him. Directed by Joshua Erkman, starring David Yow, Kai Lennox, Sarah Lind, Zachary Ray Sherman, and Ashley …
Absurdist comedy as flat as its setting, a godforsaken Southwest town (pop. 87) put under quarantine when an overturned tanker spills the "secret ingredient" of Empire Cola across the road. The literal high point is the World's Largest Ice Cream Cone, the town's tourist attraction. With Brendan Sexton III, Kate …
The film opens on a telling moment: a mistress gives her domestic Teresa (Paulina Garcia) a manicure so that her mitts might look spectacular when they receive their owner’s walking papers. We know very little about Teresa except that she has killer nails and a desperate desire to recover a …
Now that you've seen all five Step Up movies, you may find yourself craving a dance movie that's bolder, more daring. Something serious, maybe with political overtones. Like Footloose in Iran or something. Maybe based on a true story, too. Well okay then!
A sort of lesbian rallying call, based on a novel by Jane Rule. The physical setting is quite good, although the best of it -- a Nevada dude ranch for recuperating divorcées, Western shirts with fancy piping, and so on -- was better in The Women; and the 1950s time-setting …
Sit right down and watch a film about some people who are pushing themselves to their physical limits by traversing various extreme terrains. Maybe while you're sitting there, you can push yourself to your physical limits by consuming an entire kitchen trash bag full of smuggled-in popcorn. As the trailer …
What happens when a van containing a group of hopeful border-jumpers breaks down a few miles outside of Tijuana? Nothing we haven’t seen in dozens other well intentioned cautionary fables. Never mind revenge or collecting a bounty: the only motivation the screenwriters endow cartoon bad guy Jeffrey Dean Morgan with …
Noel Coward's play, adapted by Ben Hecht, about a bohemian ménage à trois in a Paris garret. We've been told it was naughty in its day. We have to take this, if at all, on faith. Ernst Lubitsch directs it with a certain style -- his certain style -- but …
It was Werner Herzog who sparked festival organizer (and director of this doc) Stuart Swezey’s vision. If Fitzcarraldo could bring an opera to a jungle, what’s stopping Swezey from staging an industrial music concert in the middle of the Mojave? The Desolation Center happenings began in an abandoned warehouse in …