Low-budget "mockumentary" wherein an abrasive, facetious, blabbering would-be filmmaker by the name of Myles Berkowitz hits upon the idea of finally getting a film made by simply filming himself (or rather, videotaping himself) on a series of dates with women. And maybe as a bonus, falling in love. (Either that, …
Takeoff from a true story, presumably far, far off, about a team of MIT math whizzes who, drilled by a Mephistophelean mentor on the faculty, visit Vegas on weekends to beat the house at blackjack. The film is not able to make the frowned-upon practice of “card counting” comprehensible, much …
The first English-language feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu brings together disparate characters by the same matchmaking method of his Amores Perros: by car accident. Benicio Del Toro, a born-again ex-con, runs over the husband and two daughters of Naomi Watts, and the husband's heart is transplanted anonymously into …
Michael Winterbottom's re-creation of the Manchester pop scene from the mid-Seventies through the Eighties: i.e., from punk to rave. Breathless, chaotic, self-consciously "postmodern" -- which translates into raggedy, uneven visuals and a main character who addresses the camera with full knowledge of future events and full awareness that he's in …
A shared load of working-mother stress and pressure, not everyone's notion of moviegoing fun. Director Nancy Savoca (True Love, Dogfight, Household Saints) makes little personal movies about small-as-life people, mainly women, in small-as-life predicaments, almost as if she were operating in the field of the serious novel rather than the …
Pretentious, heart-on-sleeve New York movie pointedly set post-9/11: the blue beacons of light that stand where the Twin Towers once stood; the clean-up operations in the pit below the windows of one of the main characters; the Osama bin Laden wanted posters; the firefighter shrine at an Irish pub; the …
Girly fairy tale to do with the proverbial always-a-bridesmaid, twenty-seven times by actual count, with a closetful of once-worn gowns to prove it, who stands mutely by as her slutty younger sister returns home and steals her dreamy boss right out from under her nose. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and …
In the violent prologue, a ski-masked commando team of animal-rights activists storms the Cambridge Primate Research Center to liberate the experimental chimps, heedless of the attendant's warnings ("You've no idea!") that the chimps have been "infected" with rage. Sure enough, the chimps do not exactly embrace their liberators. Twenty-eight days …
Michael Apted was only a subordinate member of the filmmaking team that interviewed fourteen British seven-year-olds of varied backgrounds for a 1963 Granada Television program called 7 Up, but it was he who thought to keep up with the group thereafter, tracking them down and shooting them at seven-year intervals …
Zombie recurrence in the U.K., under U.S. military occupation, and under Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (of Intacto) in place of Danny Boyle (of the original 28 Days Later). The scrappy, scruffy digital visuals are largely annoying (as if the zombies weren't bothersome enough), though there are some effective scenes, …
Fatuous chatter between mid-thirties lovers, two years together, an uptight American designer and a carefree French photographer, visiting her parents in Paris. Julie Delpy, surrounding herself with her actual family, and showing unknown depths of self-indulgence, is the star, director, writer, editor, composer, and vocalist over the closing credits. And …
Is the title a score? -- as in, the Fast and the Furious all knotted up at two. Or is it a head count, a poll? The ex-cop from Los Angeles (Paul Walker, resuming his role from the unquantified The Fast and the Furious of two years earlier) is undeniably …
Like Sin City, this takes its material from a "graphic novel" by Frank Miller, and in turn it takes from the film treatment of that one — or to be more precise, director Zack Snyder takes from director Robert Rodriguez — the same, or similar, unnatural light, "virtual" backgrounds, coarse-grained …
Casino heisters disguised as Elvis impersonators (including Kurt Russell, who had plenty of practice in John Carpenter's made-for-TV biopic on the King). Not the most logical starting point, this, for the slo-mo bloodbath that soon follows. The tone never does stabilize: coolness, callousness, phony sentiment, ga-ga action scenes, sadism and …