The melting pot of modern London, with special accommodation for emigrés of the Balkans (origin of the writer and director, Jasmin Dizdar). One of the plotlines -- wherein a young heroin addict curls up on a cargo crate at the airport and wakes up in Bosnia -- outpulls the rest, …
The feature debut of music-video and television-ad director Spike Jonze concerns a sidewalk puppeteer (John Cusack, looking as scraggly as Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo), whose explicitly erotic production of Abelard and Heloise earns him repeated punches in the mouth, and whose wife populates their apartment with a diapered chimp and …
Besides the prefix and suffix of its title, this shares with Beloved the spectacle of Thandie Newton peeing on her own feet, puking, and behaving generally as if possessed by Linda Blair. Her character is that of a refugee from an African dictatorship, now a maid in Italy. Her master, …
Saccharine science fiction concerning a domestic android named Andrew, who comes to want his freedom and his humanity. We go through a long stretch of sitcom material, followed by an even longer, and slower, stretch of tearjerker material, both stretches littered with juvenile off-color material. Isaac Asimov, the author of …
Adam Sandler adopts a five-year-old in order to appear mature by comparison and impress his girlfriend. It doesn't work: neither the impressing nor the appearing mature. Lovers of peepee jokes are requested to love him anyway. With Joey Lauren Adams, Leslie Mann, Jon Stewart, Rob Schneider, Steve Buscemi; directed by …
Shoestring independent production that purports to be the "found" footage of a trio of student filmmakers who disappeared in the Maryland woods while shooting a documentary on a local ghost story. It shows an intelligent awareness of its own limitations, and a practical aptitude for making do. There is, to …
A paranoid scientist takes his pregnant wife into a gymnasium-sized fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis and, under the impression the bombs have begun to drop, waits thirty-five years for the radiation to blow over. Boy, is the joke ever on them: there never was a bomb, only an …
Detective thriller in which the mental prowess of the master sleuth is glaringly spotlighted by reducing him to a quadriplegic: an almost literally disembodied brain. The arrangement vaguely suggests a high-tech variation on the modus operandi of the venerable Nero Wolfe, a voluntary shut-in (you will recall) who left the …
Hollywood satire so out of touch with reality, so willfully ignorant of actual practice, that it nullifies itself as satire. The idea is that an Ed Wood-caliber producer could shoot a superstar blockbuster, Candid Camera-style, without the superstar's co-operation. (He calls it cinéma nouveau. The film itself is called Chubby …
The true story (told before in a documentary, The Brandon Teena Story) of a young Nebraska woman in a "sexual identity crisis," and on the dodge from the law, who reversed her first and last names, attempted to pass as a man in a redneck corner of the state, and …
Minor Martin Scorsese, but in view of recent performance, minor is an improvement. Major Scorsese (Kundun, Casino, The Age of Innocence) is pretentious Scorsese, puffed-up Scorsese, inflated Scorsese. This one, an anti-valentine to New York City in the pre-Giuliani years of the decade, is an unmistakable companion piece to his …
Director Jonathan Kaplan cut his teeth on exploitation films for Roger Corman (The Student Teachers, Night Call Nurses), so it might seem only natural that he would get around to the women-in-prison genre. But by now he's serious and sensitive, the director of The Accused and Immediate Family, so the …
Idealistic paramedic comes to L.A. and goes down the drug tubes, guided by a thrill-seeking ambulance river. A festival of disgust (upchucking in a tank of exotic ish, etc.), with plenty to go around to the filmmakers themselves (interrupting the grubby reality for a dissolve-happy, allad-accompanied love scene). With Jason …
Ry Cooder, the eclectic American guitarist, singer, composer, and musicologist, rounds up some old lions (and a lioness) of Cuban popular music, for a series of live concerts, recording sessions, on-camera interviews, and ultimately a debut at Carnegie Hall. (Their sightseeing sidetrips on that occasion are a delight.) Directed by …
Uninventive variation on Speed: an experimental chemical weapon (code name: Elvis) will detonate when it hits fifty degrees Fahrenheit, if two civilians with an ice-cream truck can't fend off a crack team of mercenary terrorists. The civilians -- Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding, Jr. -- are personable, but that hardly …