Ang Lee's tantalizing, toothsome, pungent, succulent, nutritious, well-balanced, filling (etc.) comedy about a Taiwanese widower and master chef and his three grown daughters still living at home. This is the sort of material that Yasujiro Ozu used to take to the depths of profundity, while always maintaining a bravely cheerful …
Formerly called Slaughterhouse Hotel, and by any other name would smell as much. This is Tobe Hooper's encore to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and to this point the director still seems a run-of-the-mill caricaturist of redneck moronism and animalism. Certainly the roads leading into his horrific situations are traversable …
Natalie Portman narrates this documentary about what shouldn't enter one's mouth.
Cheerfully sick comedy (not as sick as John Waters, but the same disease) on such subjects as the American Dream, "fabulous Fifties furniture," and kinky sex in Los Angeles. The self-conscious aspiration to create an Instant Cult Classic reduces the need for technical competence, and indeed the erosion of all …
How and why what we eat is the cause of the chronic diseases that are killing us, and changing what we eat can save our lives one bite at a time in this documentary directed by Paul David Kennamer Jr.
The town sheriff's ne'er-do-well son, a jug-eared redhead, swipes the winning Mustang from a stock-car racetrack -- simply to appease the whim of an All-American blonde bitch in white hotpants and knee-high boots -- and takes off on a day-long joyride with a Keystone Kop posse in hot pursuit. Charles …
Self-affirming, boastful, best-selling piece of nonfiction Chick Lit transformed into a two-and-a-quarter-hour blandishment for a major star. While there is a lot of sightseeing on the heroine’s Search for Self (“I want to go someplace where I can just marvel”), Italy for food, India for meditation, Indonesia for romance — …
Avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa was on The Steve Allen Show in 1963. That was over 50 years ago. Now he’s got a Kickstarted documentary and a Twitter feed to boot. We should all be so lucky (and mustachioed).
Two unemployed Irishmen, inspired by Elvis Presley's "Wall of Death" motorcycle stunt in Roustabout, endeavor to construct their own (somewhat rickety) version of it on a vacant field of mud. The film, directed by Peter Ormrod, is billed as a Jonathan Demme Presentation, which sounds suspiciously like those "Joan Collins …
Globe-hopping paranoia thriller, tethered everywhere to cellphone and computer: Bangkok to Prague to Moscow to a fiery finish in (brace yourself) Omaha. Paralyzingly routine. With Shane West, Edward Burns, Ving Rhames, Tamara Feldman, Martin Sheen, and Jonathan Pryce; directed by Greg Marcks.
Newcomer Andrew Slater is credited with directing and co-writing what is ostensibly a documentary tribute to the influential Laurel Canyon music scene of the ‘60s. Alas, this is as much a Jakob Dylan vanity project as it is a documentary. Jakob hosts! Jakob sings! Jakob produces! Be it a soft …
The setting is a rundown Los Angeles neighborhood said to be a hotbed of Hollywood hopefuls and hopelesses, and more particularly a rundown apartment house harboring at least two such types. One of the hopeless hopefuls therein, a single mother (Susan Dey) who has been running a classified in the …