Ultraviolent vision of the future, where a more virulent strain of HIV (labelled HGV) has touched off the Blood Wars between humans and hemophages (a/k/a vampires). A live-action cartoon, or anyway partly live-action, built around Milla Jovovich as a martial-arts superheroine with a computer-airbrushed face. It gives a chill. Not …
Theo Angelopoulos, the esoterically esteemed Greek director, blends past and present, history and fiction, Balkan politics and Bazinian aesthetics, in an "epic" quest (i.e., three hours in length) for some legendary lost reels from the dawn of cinema. Sluggish, solemn, deeply felt if not necessarily strongly communicated, it plays almost …
Egghead western, written by the Scottish novelist Alan Sharp, largely devoted to the esoteric military tactics involved in rounding up a small Apache raiding party. You realize how unfamiliar you are with the fine points of Indian fighting when you hear one cavalryman eulogized as "a good man," shortly after …
Possibly De Sica's best work (he thought so himself), a neo-realist Little Man tearjerker about a dignified old pauper trying to keep his head above the subsistence level and trying not to drag his beloved dog down with him. If this proves more effective at jerking tears than his better-known …
All of the dialogue is wistfully, tunelessly sung (music by Michel Legrand), and the cheerful colors come from Candy Land. These aggressive stylistic devices soon tire themselves out, straining to overcome the pessimism which gloomily shadows the storyline; but they maintain respectable levels of taste and intelligence throughout. With Catherine …
All of the dialogue is wistfully, tunelessly sung (music by Michel Legrand), and the cheerful colors come from Candy Land. These aggressive stylistic devices soon tire themselves out, straining to overcome the pessimism which gloomily shadows the storyline; but they maintain respectable levels of taste and intelligence throughout. With Catherine …
Not long before the letters BLM became indelibly inked on our collective consciousness, the death of two African American youth, killed by the Chicago Police, forever impacted the lives of another pair of millennials: social worker Janaé Bonsu and fellow revolutionary (and celebrated “Raptivist”) Bella Bahhs. A forward-looking dissenter, Janaé …
Zeji Ozeri directs this documentary about Humberto Gurmilan, a quadriplegic seeking to return to the sea 20 years after a tragic surfing accident. In Spanish.
With the Milan Kundera novel as his source, Philip Kaufman has managed to fashion a purebred European film without subtitles, and this is bound to lend him a new sort of cachet in some people's eyes. Besides which, like The Right Stuff before it, it's three hours long: it must …
With the Milan Kundera novel as his source, Philip Kaufman has managed to fashion a purebred European film without subtitles, and this is bound to lend him a new sort of cachet in some people's eyes. Besides which, like The Right Stuff before it, it's three hours long: it must …
On the strength of director Tom Gormicon’s previous feature (That Awkward Moment) and the gravitational pull of its star, the high hopes that accompanied me into the theatre weren’t dashed. If Nic Cage had a dollar for every time a ‘k’ was tacked on the end of his first name, …
Roundabout romance between an apathetic high-school girl, awaiting nuclear extinction, and an ex-con the nature of whose crimes has undergone endless permutation in the rumor mill. Little folksy drolleries gather round like flies at a Dairy Queen, and as dismissibly. It mostly falls flat -- but budgeted so modestly, so …
Cheap thrills of the seeing-things variety: hallucinations, dreams, nothing with staying power. The initial edge thus turns dull in a hurry. But the upside-down heads — of dog and man — are creepy effects, and the climactic exorcism of a dybbuk (respectful observance of tradition), from the wispy body of …
M. Night Shyamalan's encore to The Sixth Sense, a hard act to follow. But follow it he dauntlessly does, all the way to a mandatory Surprise Ending. At first the fearsomeness of the task seems to drive him to overdirection, a big show of being busy: a woozy camera for …