A musical spoof about aliens in the San Fernando Valley, which looks very much like a musical spoof by aliens in the San Fernando Valley. In a sense, it very much is. The documentable alien in command is British director Julien Temple, whose well-known music-video credentials will perhaps make the …
An intimate coming of age story of a pregnant single mother who embraces her Bay Area community as she determines the fate of her family. From writer/director Savanah Leaf and starring Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander, Keta Price, Doechii, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Bokeem Woodbine, and Dominic Fike
Jackie Chan and Robert Redford narrate this family documentary that examines the power and beauty of the natural world.
Totally not a remake of Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. For one thing, there's no absent father. For another, the titular alien is a cute robot instead of a lumpen critter. For still another, he doesn't need to phone home. Rather, he needs to assemble the key to his ride, …
Sarah (star and cowriter Brit Marling) is a rising star at a private espionage agency who gets assigned to infiltrate the titular domestic protest organization. The East does punishment-fits-the-crime work: flooding the home of an oil exec with the same crude that his company spilled all over a coastline, etc. …
A Christmas baby, orphaned in the delivery room and provisionally named Christine ("Sounds like Christmas"), leads a London midwife (Naomi Watts) on a quest for the infant's nearest relative, and straight into the dark heart of the Russian mafia: a deceptively avuncular restaurateur (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his loose-cannon son (Vincent Cassel), …
A nightclub performer hires a naive chorus girl to become his new dance partner to make his former partner jealous and to prove he can make any partner a star.
Standup comic Jo Koy wanted so much to have a sitcom of his own that he pitched what is essentially an audition reel for a theatrical pilot — a bald-faced ripoff of an even more contemptible series of Greek nuptials — that was eventually produced on Spielberg’s dime. It’s My …
Culture-clash comedy, set in Manchester in 1971. A transplanted Paki, who himself has taken an Anglo wife, is for some reason determined that his own sons be brought up in the old way: arranged marriages and no guff. The quest for humor stoops to large quantities of pee-pee, a belated …
Elia Kazan's variation on the Cain-and-Abel theme: an accursed ne'er-do-well and his blessed goody-goody brother compete with one another under the stern, critical eye of their Bible-thumping father. The color and the locales (in John Steinbeck's California, circa World War I) are perceived with the same wide-eyed wonder as the …
Moderately interesting and handsomely photographed examination of homosexuality and its stigmatization in modern China. The central storytelling strategy -- a night-long interrogation, illustrated with flashbacks, of a flauntingly gay writer by a conflicted cop -- is stagnant and tiresome. The film has since been adapted for the stage, rather than …
Not a Jet in sight, nor shark on the menu. Juana, a single Hispanic mother (Diana Elizabeth Torres), laughs in the face of ethnic and cultural bigotry to make it as a sushi chef in this video dropcloth stained with good intentions. Torres does her own impressive cutting board stunt …
Old-fashioned women's picture, true in spirit to the period in which it is set, centered around the dutiful French wife of a Russian émigré who accepts Stalin's limited-time offer of repatriation, post-WWII. Once the couple (plus their small son, for whom the movie has little time) are securely behind the …