The town sheriff's ne'er-do-well son, a jug-eared redhead, swipes the winning Mustang from a stock-car racetrack -- simply to appease the whim of an All-American blonde bitch in white hotpants and knee-high boots -- and takes off on a day-long joyride with a Keystone Kop posse in hot pursuit. Charles …
Self-affirming, boastful, best-selling piece of nonfiction Chick Lit transformed into a two-and-a-quarter-hour blandishment for a major star. While there is a lot of sightseeing on the heroine’s Search for Self (“I want to go someplace where I can just marvel”), Italy for food, India for meditation, Indonesia for romance — …
Avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa was on The Steve Allen Show in 1963. That was over 50 years ago. Now he’s got a Kickstarted documentary and a Twitter feed to boot. We should all be so lucky (and mustachioed).
Two unemployed Irishmen, inspired by Elvis Presley's "Wall of Death" motorcycle stunt in Roustabout, endeavor to construct their own (somewhat rickety) version of it on a vacant field of mud. The film, directed by Peter Ormrod, is billed as a Jonathan Demme Presentation, which sounds suspiciously like those "Joan Collins …
When a fisherman goes missing his brother and some friends go to sea to search for him. Caught in a storm, they are forced onto a mysterious island. The island's inhabitants are slaves to the terrorist group Red Bamboo and they are guarded by #Ebirah- a giant lobster sea monster. …
Globe-hopping paranoia thriller, tethered everywhere to cellphone and computer: Bangkok to Prague to Moscow to a fiery finish in (brace yourself) Omaha. Paralyzingly routine. With Shane West, Edward Burns, Ving Rhames, Tamara Feldman, Martin Sheen, and Jonathan Pryce; directed by Greg Marcks.
Newcomer Andrew Slater is credited with directing and co-writing what is ostensibly a documentary tribute to the influential Laurel Canyon music scene of the ‘60s. Alas, this is as much a Jakob Dylan vanity project as it is a documentary. Jakob hosts! Jakob sings! Jakob produces! Be it a soft …
The setting is a rundown Los Angeles neighborhood said to be a hotbed of Hollywood hopefuls and hopelesses, and more particularly a rundown apartment house harboring at least two such types. One of the hopeless hopefuls therein, a single mother (Susan Dey) who has been running a classified in the …
Third in the loosely connected trilogy (connected not by recurrent characters, but by theme, mood, the marmoreal Monica Vitti, and a title consisting of a definite article and a noun) which established Antonioni as such a polestar in the cinema of the early Sixties. The last and least of the …
Third installment in the Twilight “saga,” with a new director, David Slade, not to say new blood, only recirculated blood. The ongoing grooming of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner as poster boys to be pinned up in pink bedrooms across the land reminds the viewer continually, with pop songs chiming …
Irish ghost story, slow, quiet, tasteful to a fault, easy to overrate for its avoidances. It deserves credit, even so, for regarding ghosts as a part of life instead of as part of a mere genre. The photos on the kitchen wall and in the bedroom efficiently fill in the …
A photographer uses his grandfather's camera to reconnect with his family.
Citizen Kane-ish journalistic investigation into the disappearance, twenty years past, of a New Jersey rock-and-roll singer. Did he really go to the bottom of the river with his '57 Chevy, or did he pull an Arthur Rimbaud? (Why else was his final unreleased album titled Season in Hell, and why …