Christopher Collet presents an image of Teenager of the Year, in the role of a normally rambunctious tenth-grader who can nonetheless pull himself together at appropriate moments for lofty displays of maturity. There are many such moments. The delicate situation, for all concerned, of a divorced mother trying to strike …
In ancient times, they might have called First Cow, an allegorical tale of two culturally discordant cowpokes who join forces to carve out a culinary slice of the American dream, “Figowitz and the Chinaman” and played it for laughs. Hired as cook for a company of Oregon fur trappers, Otis …
Second apolitical comedy in the same election year to deal with the wing-spreading of the President's only child, this girl heading west to college, in the footsteps of Chelsea Clinton, while her father campaigns for a second term. The film had the bad fortune to be beaten into the marketplace …
Frank Sinatra has a nice, gentle way with a line, making for easy listening, even when the lines go painfully bad, as they especially tend to do during the hospital visits to his ailing wife that take him away from his police duties. On a couple of these occasions he …
There are a few directorial touches which indicate that Buck Henry, the writer and director, did not go completely comatose during the making of this misguided political spoof. Best of these is the change of color in the President's face after he has imbibed an African beverage composed of donkey …
Dramatized uplift of an inspiring man, with the glow of a National Geographic production. Oliver Litondo is moving as very old, partly crippled (from torture) Maruge, a long-ago Mau Mau rebel in Kenya who decides he finally wants to read and write. Pretty Naomie Harris is a charisma burst as …
Another run-through of the deathless Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot legend, cripplingly shackled on its run by the casting of Richard Gere in the part of Lancelot -- a smarty-pantsy, ants-in-his-pantsy Lancelot, with a glide in his step, a dip in his knee, a swivel in his hips, a twitch or a wink or …
Heroine Monica is a drug-addicted whore who was pimped out by her sexually abusive father in order to pay his debts, and when we meet her, she’s in her underwear, spread-eagled face down on the floor in a mid-range shot that also captures the basement-style squalor of her living arrangements. …
One of the nicer compliments payable to first-time filmmaker Jesse Peretz is that his background in TV commercials and music videos is nowhere evident on screen. Even the interesting selections of pop songs on the soundtrack (with heavy representation by a group calling itself Shudder to Think) are for the …
Gravity used space to explore the existential alienation brought on by the death of a child. The Martian used space to explore human ingenuity and drive at the level of nuts and bolts and chemistry. Director Damien Chazelle’s latest gives us a mashup of the two that is sadly less …
It’s the Super Bowl of fashion, and Andrew Rossi (Page One) takes us backstage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual celebrity-studded fundraiser. Positioned in the cellar, the Met’s Costume Institute appears to be operated by a vampire academy of haute couture zombies, scuttling under the spell of gala chairperson, …
The opening night feature of this year's San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.