Directorial debut of playwright and scenarist, plus actor and sex symbol, Sam Shepard. This inveterate snooper into family closets, or family laundry hampers and trash cans, has here travelled for that purpose to the home country of his real-life mate -- northern Minnesota and Jessica Lange respectively. Whatever fascinating secrets …
Junior-teen high adventure about an African-born white girl, tenderfoot tourist boy, and young Bushman fleeing from poachers across the barren Kalahari ("Wind can do it, we can do it"). Walkabout it isn't. Director Mikael Salomon, like Nicolas Roeg a proven cinematographer, finds lots of pretty landscapes and tangerine skies, not …
Lust, maybe love, and larceny in the Florida sun, and lassitude in the darkened theater. The plot twists come very slowly and foreseeably. With Jacqueline Bisset, Adam Garcia, Alice Evans, and Stuart Wilson; written and directed by Klaus Menzel.
A married couple who are unhappy with their marriage experience big changes when a sudden accident turns their lives upside down.
Stripped-down action sequel. Or anyway, the title is stripped down, dumping the definite articles and demoting the nouns to adjectives. The tricked-out action, meanwhile, barrels ahead with total disregard for lucidity or credibility. It’s not precisely a reunion of the original four stars, Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Michelle …
The world of street racing (vroom-vroom) intersects with that of truck hijacking: your basic drive-in movie (if there were still drive-ins), souped up with headbanger music (thunk-thunk), some chest-flattening effects of speed, and a honey-glazed cast of hot bods. (Michelle Rodriguez, among them, makes the jump from the low-budget, independent …
Offensive foul: charging. This college basketball comedy gets off to a good start, looking at the frustrated athletes who can be found hanging around New York City gyms and playgrounds, but it gets carried away with itself: "We're number one!" and all that. With Gabriel Kaplan; directed by Jack Smight.
Director Errol Morris is less a moviemaker than a tastemaker, a tour guide to unbeaten paths, and here his nose for the odd and the eccentric has led him to sit down to chat with four diverse specialists, a wild-animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robotics scientist, and an authority …
Bruiser Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson really ought to share star billing with his equally muscle bound Chevelle SS, but instead it goes to a greasy, ruined Billy Bob Thornton as the druggie cop assigned to stop Johnson's mission of (mostly) righteous revenge. The story, almost Western in its spareness, wants …
Russ Meyer's live-action comic strip (in weekday black-and-white) about a predatory pack of hot-rod hellcats: not one of his "nudies," but instead a cross-over attempt for the drive-in market, and a failure at the time. The first five or ten minutes are a kick. Perhaps any five or ten minutes …
When a world champion of sport stacking is dumped by his long-time girlfriend, he has to learn basic adulting skills in order to live alone and take care of himself. A film by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit.
Ocean’s 11-style caper pic with more mayhem and darker skin. (Paul Walker’s whiteness here gleams like marble; his performance is similarly statuesque.) You get plenty of pretty machines and pretty ladies to go with your muscles, explosions, and bro-banter, but for a film stuffed with two of the hardest hardbodies …
Multicharacter fictionalization of Eric Schlosser's nonfiction exposé of the same name. With it, director Richard Linklater picks up a placard and joins the radical parade of American fictioneers from Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair and Jack London and John Steinbeck and on down. The major issues, too many to fit …
The cars, they are very pretty. Vin Diesel's voice, it is very gravelly. The Rock, he is very large. (Though not as large as the muscle hauled in by the bad guys. Say this for the Fast & Furious franchise: it understands that it must keep topping itself in terms …