Eight re-creations of the Japanese director's unconscious dreams. All are so limpid, so economical, so tidy -- so much so as to cast doubts on the authenticity of their origins or the accuracy of their re-creations -- that the viewer is able to feel like Freud's brightest disciple. Death would …
Disney's animated Arabian Nights tale, with politically enlightened Mediterranean noses and tawny complexions as well as a feministically flattered heroine. The obligatory songs sound even more dashed-off than the ones in the preceding year's Beauty and the Beast ("Riffraff! Street rat! I don't buy that!/ If only they'd look closer …
Creditable retelling of an early chapter in Texas history ("As goes the Alamo, so goes Texas"), not as cumbersome as the John Wayne version of 1960, perhaps even a little cursory. Director and co-screenwriter John Lee Hancock humanizes the central figures -- Crockett, Bowie, Travis, Houston, though not the ogre-ish …
A heretofore unknown director, Sterling Van Wagenen, shows off a heart the size of a honeydew and a cinematic intelligence nearer a grape. In a dollhouse re-creation of Second World War-period New York, a traumatized French girl, methodically tearing up newspapers into tiny scraps, is coaxed back from the brink …
A young prostitute (with child in tow) is bounced from her “house” by the same law enforcement officers sworn to help keep her off the streets. In this case, writer-director Anahí Berneri’s fly on the wall technique frequently translates into long takes from a fixed camera giving ample time, if …
A relentless gallery of raillery aimed at introducing Steve Coogan and company’s Alan Partridge -the quick-witted and eminently inflated fictional radio and television host - to American multiplexes. The corporatization of a British radio station causes the recently axed overnight man (Colm Meany) to flip out: he ends up taking …
Dark comedy of home security, emotional insecurity, double-dealing, paranoia. Heavy-handedly directed (by Evan Dunsky) and broadly acted by the male leads (David Arquette, Stanley Tucci). With Kate Capshaw and Mary McCormack.
Unadventurous wilderness adventure about an uprooted Chicago Cubs fan and his younger sister who, escorted by a baby polar bear dubbed "Cubby," search the Alaskan mountains for their father, teetering helplessly on a precipice in his downed plane. (Yes, just to round out the "cub" motif, a Piper Cub.) Everything …
On her way to the most important meeting of her career, a New York executive is forced to share a rental car with her ex-fiancé's mother, only to discover that the mother is hiding a major secret. Written and directed by Christine Swanson, starring Renée Elise Goldsberry, Lynn Whitfield, J. …
Glenn Close, looking quite small, revives a role she did to off-Broadway acclaim 30 years earlier. Albert, a parched, remote, miserly, desexed “male” butler, is really a woman. His life at a Dublin hotel is mediocre, but Close achieves a sad, stricken pathos. She almost loses the film to Janet …