Repetitious duel of wills between an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) and a tubercular thug (a very young and very histrionic Toshiro Mifune), mired together in a sort of urban swamp. The element of realism, in the postwar manner, does not conceal for a moment that the whole thing is allegoric. …
It’s been decades since a film with “National Lampoon” in its title has been worth watching, let alone applauding. For the first 10 years of its existence, the humor magazine was my comedy Qur’an, a monthly dose of unrepentant shock and bad taste that merrily went out of its way …
Provincial French couple get out of a rut and go off the rails after they meet The Queens of the Night, a cross-dressing nightclub team. A cheesily "provocative" premise given a boringly "serious" treatment. With Miou-Miou and Charles Berling; directed by Anne Fontaine.
Marlon Brando's fifteen-minute portrait of a Human Rights lawyer at work on a hopeless murder case in South Africa is a welcome dose of caginess in an otherwise artlessly direct protest film, with its burning gaze hardly wavering an inch from The Problem. (The lawyer's fondness for flowers in spite …
The story of Devi Sri Prasad, an Indian film composer, lyricist, singer-songwriter and performer. Popularly known by his initials DSP, he's best known for his work in Telugu-language films, and has also worked in a few Tamil films. Starring Vijay Sethupathi, and Anukereethy Vas in the lead roles, music by …
DTF: Down to Fornicate. It’s impossible to imagine the eponymous initialism was there from the outset. Doting filmmaker Al Bailey (he played matchmaker for the film’s subject “Christian” and his late wife Charlotte) initially intended a documentary feature on how airplane pilots use dating apps to find true love. From …
Yes, it means what you think it means — but also more! Jack Black commits, wholeheartedly and straightfacedly, to the part of Dan Landsman, a Midwestern guy with an admiring boss, a great wife, and a good kid who is nevertheless obsessed with having some bros. Guy friends, like the …
Fine costume piece. Well, the costumes anyhow are fine. The piece as a whole is only fairish, a predigested potage of 18th-century sexism, blueblood cold-bloodedness, paramours, bastards, the mandatory male heir, all of it “based on a true story.” Rachel Portman’s music, much more than Saul Dibb’s direction, creates the …
Veteran writer-director Mel Frank delivers one scene that's on a par with the material he used to give Bob Hope and Danny Kaye: two stagecoach passengers conversing in a sort of pidgin polyglot so as not to be understood by a third party ("el schmucko"). But by then, you are …
Modest little Mexican comedy by Fernando Eimbcke, shot in black-and-white, or anyway low-contrast gray, with an impassive static camera and a strong compositional eye for the artless, graceless lines and planes of a drab urbanscape. (The few grainy flashbacks with a mobile hand-held camera add nothing, and the one that …
The finale, a crescendo to an almost euphoric light-headedness, is a schizophrenic battle scene of abrupt time jumps and costume changes, and it disengages itself from logic far beyond the Marxes' usual tease-and-torment repartee. This is as high off the ground as the Brothers ever get. Directed by Leo McCarey.