Okay, they've got a title, but where to go from there? The sole survivor of a Jonestown-ian suicide cult seems to be pursued from beyond the grave by its barbecued leader -- not pursued in a straight line, but by first zigzagging through all of her mates in group therapy. …
An Almodóvar paella of priestly pederasty, transvestitism, female impersonation, film, stage, assorted spices and savories. (Gael García Bernal in the persona of cabaret artiste Zahara looks strikingly like a blond Julia Roberts.) The presentation is polished and colorful as always; the onion-y layers of reality -- of fiction within fiction …
Tall tale about a quartet of Honty Tonk Harlots, as the wanted posters describe them, on the run from Pinkerton detectives while simultaneously in pursuit of the outlaw gang that made off with their $12,000 nest egg. (In pursuit, more poetically, more American Dreamily, of a clean start at an …
With this one added on to Bedroom Window (added on to the screenplay of Silent Partner), Curtis Hanson has taken another long stride toward enthroning himself as the Patricia Highsmith of the cinema. Never mind "the new Alfred Hitchcock" and never mind the "innocent man" theme. What Highsmith knows well, …
Terry Malick's re-examination of the Charles Starkweather case is conducted under antiseptic laboratory conditions. A homicidal maniac, who does an uncanny James Dean impression in T-shirt and cowboy boots, and his baton-twirler girlfriend, take flight, cross-country; but they find themselves continually penned into arty, desolate compositions and saddled with inane …
The titular adjective reveals itself to be a definite understatement: our lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) oftentimes seems like a spy from the underworld, and a not very clever or cautious spy at that, who somehow has infiltrated the New York Police Department. He takes drugs the whole day through (albeit holding …
Nearly but not quite a remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant of 1992, at the very least a relocation of it from the Big Apple to the Big Easy, perhaps simply a variation on a theme — all the same kinds of badness, drugs, gambling, prostitutes, a blind eye to …
The remake of The Bad News Bears, minus the definite article, plugs in Billy Bob Thornton in the Walter Matthau part, a former professional baseball player and current full-time drunk, enlisted to coach a team of Little League rejects (now sponsored not by Chico's Bail Bonds, though that establishment gets …
Bill (son of Burt) Lancaster's script takes an aloofly adult, isn't-that-cute view of a Little League pennant race. (And the use of Bizet's music as counterpoint to the kids' struggles is something that might have been thought up by the pompous CBS sports department.) No matter how condescending the treatment, …
Having exhausted their fund of profanities, boners, and late-inning miracles in their two earlier outings, the precocious Little Leaguers are shifted into the background in order to convert this sequel into a Tony Curtis vehicle. Curtis is mostly unfunny, but not unaffecting, as a middle-aged, graying, and increasingly desperate version …
Sick and twisted (and goddam proud of it) Christmas comedy by Terry Zwigoff, whose Ghost World instantaneously takes on the appearance of a fluke. It was the characters, even more clearly now than before, who "made" Ghost World — them, and their literary or quasi-literary creator, the graphic novelist Daniel …
Akira Kurosawa's sortie into the chilly white-collar world of corporate corruption is an uneven mixture of muckraking journalism and hysterical revenge tragedy. But the opening segment at least -- twenty minutes on a talk-of-the-town wedding celebration -- is unbeatable in its use of wide-screen space, as it jumps between dense, …
The mystery element, which doesn't claim our attention until very near the end, has to do with what really happened to Theresa Russell, who spends the length of the movie in a hospital emergency room having her stomach pumped, her throat perforated, her vagina sampled, etc., while we get bits …
German director Percy Adlon's first film in America, aglow with the optimism of the American Dream. The story of a Bavarian tourist (the hefty Marianne Sagebrecht, of Adlon's Sugarbaby), who is abandoned by her travelling companion -- husband? -- in full mountaineering costume at the edge of the Mohave Desert, …