By means of a radical face-lift seemingly in conscious homage to Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (surgical lasers replacing scalpels), John Travolta and Nicolas Cage trade faces and places as an anti-terrorist federal agent and a mad bomber, respectively. And then, if you follow, vice versa. The actors look …
When a 73-year-old widow is forced to depend on the care of her 5 busy adult children after an injury, she begins to question the meaning of family love.
Can we see the face of the invisible God? Do we know what our Savior looked like? The film The Face of Jesus explores two acheiropoietic images—sacred cloths not made by human hands—the Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Manoppello, as well as the most extraordinary depiction of Jesus …
Annette Bening loses her husband of 30 years (Ed Harris), only to then fall in love with a man who looks just like him (Ed Harris).
The collapse, all of a sudden, of a long-standing middle-class marriage comes about when both mates undergo a fling, by a wonderful coincidence, on the same long night. Storyline, locale, even character relationships, all tend to be eclipsed by the Cassavetes visual style, which is quite accurately described in the …
A woman working as a content moderator for a major video platform discovers what appears to be re-enactments of murders from the original Faces of Death video series. In an online world where nothing can be trusted, she must determine whether the violence is fiction, or unfolding in real time.
Jean-Luc Godard was 33 when he starred in Agnes Varda’s short comedy The Fiancés of the MacDonald Bridge. That’s the same age as the photographer JR, the sole person ever to share a director’s credit with the New Wave pioneer, and also her co-star here. By Varda’s own admission, an …
Ingmar Bergman's clinical account of a psychiatrist's nervous breakdown (the filmmaker's interest in psychiatry extends only as far as his affirmation of its inadequacy to spiritual crisis) is divided cleanly in halves. The first, the mundane half, contains some good stuff about the heroine's grandparents, particularly the fastidious set decoration …
Documentary about West Australian slab wave surfer Kerby Brown, a man whose connection with the ocean runs as deep as his love for his family. Kerby is joined by his family on his quest to ride a ferocious slab wave in the deep southern ocean that no one on the …
Documentary about the life and work of Sarah Cannon, aka Minnie Pearl. Sarah was a serious, educated woman who had once dreamed of becoming a Shakespearean actress, but she found fame playing a simple country girl who often made herself the butt of her jokes. Instantly identifiable – even in …
Italian women's film, from Turkish-born filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek, filtered through the sensibility of a vaguely discontented wife, a drudging accountant in a Roman chicken factory and a moonlighting pastry chef too old (at thirty) to start anew as an apprentice baker, with a shiftless husband currently on the night shift, …
Morbid remembrance of the blip-like rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick, tricked out with pseudodocumentary gimmicks by the sometime documentarist George Hickenlooper. Andy Warhol, well mimicked by Guy Pearce, is not hard to make into a compelling figure. But Sedgwick -- elevator heiress, socialite, art groupie, temporary "it" girl, drug …
A respectable addition to Bukowskiana, if respectability can be a criterion for the life and work of the pickled writer, Charles Bukowski. A mangily bearded Matt Dillon, in the part of the author's semi-autobiographical stand-in, Henry Chinaski, gives a full-bodied performance, and a literally full-body one, his head tilted backwards …