A sexed-up (if not exactly sexy), sassy, and ultimately slight crime comedy/road movie from Ethan Coen, who co-wrote the script with his wife Tricia Cooke. The setting is 1999, when gay marriage was still a matter of where you lived — worth noting when your protagonists are lesbians living in …
In the shadows of their bedroom, a Japanese power couple — actor-director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and screenwriter Oto Kafuku (Reika Kirishima) — take advantage of their post-coital glow to hatch an idea for a T.V. pilot. She is always with him; while driving, he runs lines off a tape …
The pretty girls and prettier boys of the glamorous world of "open-wheel racing." Vapid talk, careening camerawork, screeching rock songs. With Sylvester Stallone (who also wrote the script), Kip Pardue, Til Schweiger, Estella Warren, Stacy Edwards, Gina Gershon, Cristian de la Fuente, and Burt Reynolds; directed by Renny Harlin.
Cops-and-robbers stuff, stripped to the barest essentials of the genre, reduced to the irreducible, abstracted to no more than the bluesy mood and the methodical, calculated, chess-game maneuvers. The nearly monochromatic color and uncluttered compositions conjure up a poetic night world somewhat in the manner of "Whistler's nocturnes." Writer-director Walter …
A summer job with an over-the-hill actress (Julie Walters) emboldens a timid minister's son (Rupert Grint, the Ronald Weasley of the Harry Potter series) to throw off the yoke of his smothering mother (Laura Linney). Coming-of-age confection, sweet enough to cause tummy ache. Written and directed by Jeremy Brock.
Madeleine, 92 years old, can no longer stay alone at home. Charles, a cab driver, comes to take her to an old folks homeon the other side of Paris. Madeleine asks Charles to go through the places in the capital that counted in her life. We discover little by little …
Essentially a two-character piece -- a crotchety old Southern Jewess and her amiable black chauffeur -- based on a Pulitzer Prized play of typically slight distinction, cozy, comforting, demographically made-to-order for the upper-middle-class middlebrow Broadway theatergoer. Despite the efforts of Bruce Beresford (the Australian director on an extended Southern sabbatical: …
The Hammer horror factory already had the thought (in 1971) to re-do the R.L. Stevenson tale as a sex-change thing: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Of course that version didn't have the thought to do it funny. But then this version had only the thought, not also the ability. Tim …
First in the film series employing Ian Fleming's James Bond, Agent 007, Her Majesty's Secret Service. Perhaps a trifle swifter and leaner (Sean Connery conspicuously so) than the subsequent ones; but fairly well developed, muscled, principled, even at this stage. Ursula Andress is Honey; Joseph Wiseman is Dr. No, a …
First in the film series employing Ian Fleming's James Bond, Agent 007, Her Majesty's Secret Service. Perhaps a trifle swifter and leaner (Sean Connery conspicuously so) than the subsequent ones; but fairly well developed, muscled, principled, even at this stage. Ursula Andress is Honey; Joseph Wiseman is Dr. No, a …
A widowed mother on her first date in years arrives at an upscale restaurant where she is relieved that her date, Henry, is more charming and handsome than she expected. But their chemistry begins to curdle as Violet begins being irritated and then terrorized by a series of anonymous drops …
Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski: hunched and shuffling, folded in on himself both physically and otherwise. When we meet him, he's tending bar at his cousin Marv's (a ponderous, sullen James Gandolfini) old place, a neighborhood joint now run by Chechen gangsters who sometimes use it to receive unbankable cash …
An imaginary playmate, imprisoned as a jack-in-a-box for twenty years, is let loose when his old friend returns home after a separation from her husband. Only he's not really imaginary, just invisible to all but his playmate, and completely uncontrollable. And, with his shit-snot-puke predilections and his British music-hall costume …