A serial-murder aficionado and would-be bestselling author, about to set out on a cross-country tour of historic murder sites in preparation for a book (with photos by his girlfriend, a specialist in chic black-and-white erotica), advertises on a campus bulletin board for a ride-share couple (his Lincoln convertible gets only …
The title, like Boccaccio 70, like Casanova 70, like De Sade, like Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), is simply to set up an expectation of hot stuff. What actually awaits is a rosily photographed costume romance, set unconvincingly in the 16th Century, …
Those wanting to turn their bathtub into a craft sake brewery need look no further. Historians need not apply. Given the rich cultural lineage associated with sake, one would rightfully expect a documentary on the subject to devote a healthy portion of its running time to exploring the history of …
Who woulda thunk that The Covenant would get its own doppelganger a la Deep Impact and Armageddon? But here we are: an undercover CIA operative gets stuck in hostile territory in Afghanistan after his mission is exposed. Accompanied by his translator, he must fight enemy combatants as he tries to …
Timely exposé of the plight of women under the Taliban. The narrative peg -- an exiled Afghan journalist sneaking back into the country to reach her sister before the latter's pre-announced suicide in concert with the final eclipse of the 20th Century -- may be overly contrived and corny, and …
Literary cinema at its most numbingly loquacious, most crampedly illustrational. Because the D.H. Lawrence novel is autobiographical, you get not just a piece of literature by him, but him himself -- under the pseudonym of Richard Somers, and in the form of Colin Friels, looking as much like Lawrence as …
This concert documentary film chronicles Daniel's time in the rehearsal room, his stripped back and natural self with the people closest to him, and a glimpse into his mindset and resolve through heartfelt interviews.
An even flatter movie than state, with a capricious plotline about a cross-country freeloader who, after joining up with a criminal psychopath, robs a bank, saves a little girl from drowning, and falls in love with a haughty horsewoman. Matt Dillon, as the criminal, though doubtfully psychopathic, is believably not …
A light snooze through the subjects of race, crime, politics, and jazz in said city -- hometown of director Robert Altman -- in the mid-Thirties. To summarize it in such terms is to make it sound more ambitious than it honestly is. The period re-creation -- the array of automobiles, …