A kind of anti-Casablanca wherein there is no nobler cause than the fortress of love. It has mystery, romance, two romances in fact, a period setting, desert scenery, a backdrop of war, though none of these in sufficient quantity to necessitate nearly two-and-three-quarter hours of screen time. Neither of the …
Sleek, fast-moving, and, even though it appears at times to be getting reckless and out of control (stay calm, have patience), really quite adroitly handled espionage tale. The plot, which sends a broadcaster for Free World Radio ("The Voice That Speaks the Truth") on a perilous mission beyond the Berlin …
Interrupted long takes serve as bookends to our story. What appears to be a police interrogation room is in actuality a television studio. It’s been ten years since Nancy’s (Roxana Campos) daughter’s passing, and as many desperate souls are conditioned to do, she turns to TV as a remedy to …
Second World War espionage thriller, set on the British homefront at Bletchley Park, otherwise known as Station X, the top-secret cryptography center, where they've now got just four days to crack "Shark," the revised German U-boat code, before a convoy of merchant ships from the U.S. enters perilous waters. In …
The Spanish paterfamilias in the oncology wing of a Parisian hospital seems to be suffering from paranoid fantasies in addition to terminal cancer. Or is there some truth in them? There's a mystery here, but it has little pull -- just enough. Well played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, Fernando Fernán Gómez, …
Doris Dorrie's didactic comedy about two German brothers on a trek to a Buddhist monastery outside Tokyo. Over and above the subject matter, however, it is yet another DV demo with a bland, washed-out, homogenized image that appears encased somehow in the skin of a bratwurst. (The lovely -- and …
Kate Churchill’s breezy, informal documentary sets up a completely artificial situation to document. The filmmaker, a seven-year yoga practitioner, or in other words a bare tyro, wants to test the transformative powers of the practice, picks as a guinea pig a photogenic newbie of the opposite sex (a self-described “godless …
Romantic thriller from R. S. Vima.
Too much. An empowerment potboiler lifted above a USA Network original only by the star power of Jennifer Lopez, it chronicles the heroine's time-lapse evolution from greasy-spoon waitress to satin-sheets bride to blank-check homemaker to cheated-on, battered, and verbally abused spouse. First major warning sign: her husband declines her request …
A nasty, self-destructive masseuse (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) learns that a client (Catherine Keener) is the former wife of her new squeeze (James Gandolfini) and quickly uses whatever information she can glean to sabotage their relationship. Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing, Please Give) moves far off-center with this contrived chick-flick. Running gags …
Everything you already knew about the plundering energy giant -- and worse. Archival clips (CNN, C-SPAN, etc.), talking heads, and the disembodied voice of Peter Coyote, narrator, retrace the route from boom to bust: a chance to be horrified and disgusted all over again. Some of the horror and disgust …
Sir Laurence Olivier as the seedy, lecherous, loathsome, pathetic, and touching music-hall emcee, Archie Rice, from the John Osborne play -- his lordship's best showing on film. With Joan Plowright, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Brenda De Banzie, and Shirley Anne Field; directed by Tony Richardson.
Refuse to aim your snoot skyward when style and subject intertwine, and this nastily surreal descent into standup madness will deliver on its title. With his stringy, Dippity-Do-ed Zero Mostel combover and predilection for mucous-huffing mid-set, Neil Hamburger — a character comedian Gregg Turkington has spent the past 20 years …