Multi-player mating game on the playing field of Portland, Ore. Essentially soap opera with philosophical aspirations and a tendency to talk them at us. Most of it is mildly interesting, in a low-suds sort of way, but the relentless effort to transform it into a Big Statement ("God is either …
Michael Corrente's directorial debut. More pointedly, his application for the post of The New Martin Scorsese. Guys called Nicky and Ralphy and Joey and Bobby and Frankie, cruising the mean streets of Providence, Rhode Island. One of them, with just a soupçon of bathos, reaches for another world as embodied …
Fleeing Minnesota, more like it, but getting nowhere fast. The coerced bride of a mob bookkeeper dispenses sexual favors to entice her brother-in-law, a small-time stickup man, to run away to Vegas. Steven Baigelman's filmmaking debut intends to be shaggily eccentric, but the intention drowns in a brownish mush of …
A mosaic-style comedy following the life of a woman as time passes in her long-term casual BDSM relationship, low-level corporate job, and quarrelsome Jewish family.
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan travels to Ireland and England, to follow a young Irish lass whose young lad has disgracefully enlisted in the British army as well as disgracefully gotten her pregnant. The lad's mother will not divulge his new address, and the lass's father is no help either ("You're …
That it took ten minutes to realize that Félicité wasn’t a documentary was itself a miracle, as the camera wound sinuously through a sparsely populated dance floor in a tottering nightclub, picking up conversations that alternated between rape and romance. And the next 50 minutes — spent following the titular …
He's an aimless rascal who never got on with his (recently deceased) dad. She's a Hasidic Jew trapped in a loveless marriage and a stifling culture. Well, not exactly loveless: her husband really wants to make her happy, but he can't figure out why she wants to listen to modern …
Epic biopic of the man who founded the Church of Christ in the Philippines.
Director and co-writer Jason Banker's story of post-rape trauma is deeply unpleasant (you were expecting maybe a cheerful story, one in which Chekhov's gun somehow doesn't go off?), but thoughtfully, creatively so. Amy (co-writer Amy Everson) has always been crafty, but recent events have led her to lovingly fashion alarming …
Whitney Cummings is best known for her raunchily commendable work as a Comedy Central Roast Mistress. Here she makes her directorial debut, paired opposite Sofia Vergara, for an occasionally amusing look at the science behind our romantic fluffs. Through with romance, a nerdy neuroscientist (Cummings) with a minor in clairvoyance …
The premise, or thesis, taken from a work of nonfiction by Dr. Louise J. Kaplan and spelled out on screen in a printed preamble, asserts that conformance to the "normal" is the biggest perversion of all. Or something like that. First-time filmmaker Susan Streitfeld has attempted, with some degree of …
Divine chases fame all the way from high school to the electric chair -- a mock tabloid tragedy by John Waters. "Give us something twisted, give us something warped," the fashion photographer's entreaty to Divine, as she madly shakes her walrus-like body, might well be the motto of the entire …
Jules’ life and career as a drag queen is destroyed by a homophobic attack. But when he re-encounters his attacker, the deeply-closeted Preston, in a gay sauna, he is presented with a chance to exact revenge. Unrecognizable out of his wig and make-up, Jules infiltrates Preston’s life, and in doing …
The inauguration of Eric Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs series, and the sense of a New Beginning is perhaps underscored by the scraping-off of surface polish and the return to early-New-Wave roughness. (The movie was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35.) The situations border on, or cross over into, …