Another controlled outpouring of lyricism, a dribble here, a splash there, from the maker of The Color of Paradise, Majid Majidi. The first half -- or more -- is filled with the sights and sounds of a construction site in urban Iran, with no gussying-up through photographic frill or musical …
Chintzy-looking Italian reproduction of the French erotic comic strip, starring the doll-like Jane Fonda under her then-husband Roger Vadim's direction. There are colors and costumes galore in an attempt to look space-y; but this movie, for all its frantic stabs at zaniness, is just barely wittier than the average American …
Writer-director Denys Arcand's follow-up to his Decline of the American Empire, albeit following along at too far a distance — seventeen years — to have much meaning for those who never bothered, through follow-up viewings, to commit the predecessor to memory. It may be that this highbrow weepie — the …
The sort of Western -- self-consciously legendary and shot full of absurdist holes -- that kills interest in all other sorts. Fred Schepisi, the Australian director, displays here a sporadic eye for the Texas landscape and for the movement of light and shadow thereon. This, combined with such other physical …
Comedy yields to homily in the face of avaricious developers. A socially conscious snore. With Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer; directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan.
Casablanca re-located in the free city of Steel Harbor during the Second American Civil War, 2017 A.D. Rick's Cafe Americain has been renamed and refurbished as the Hammerhead, and the proprietor -- the eponymous heroine of the Dark Horse comic book -- is resolutely "neutral," until an ex-lover turns up …
Whit Stillman's idiosyncratic social comedy on a pair of sniffish, self-absorbed, fatuous young Americans abroad: male cousins, more exactly, in the sexually liberated, politically volatile Barcelona of the declining days of the Cold War. (Cousins, loosely speaking, of the preppies and debs of Stillman's first outing, Metropolitan.) It's no good …
Barbet Schroeder, a tepid-blooded romantic with a trainbearer's attachment to society's runaways, has found here another recipient worthy of his attentions: a Charles Bukowski simulacrum named Henry Chinaski, full-time, round-the-clock drunkard who periodically rouses himself from a stupor to jot down some lines of lavatory-wall literature. Since Bukowski himself has …
Formulaic computer cartoon rounds up a group of pop-acculturated, smart-mouth, bipedal farm animals who all look like kitsch knickknacks from a souvenir shop, a menagerie of cream pitchers, salt shakers, piggybanks, paperweights, and toothpick holders; rubber, plastic, ceramic; felt-covered, feathered, frosted. The focal figure is a bovine party animal who …
One of the earliest and still proudest examples of the Brazilian Cinema Nôvo, based on the celebrated Graciliano Ramos novel — a South American Grapes of Wrath — about a peasant family scratching out a living in the inclement Northeast. It offers a brutally materialistic vision of life, in the …
Kubrick's adaptation of the William Makepeace Thackeray novel -- the spiritual voyage of a naive Irish lad into face powder, lipstick, and ruination -- is after something quite far from Tony Richardson's adapatation of Tom Jones, low-born, crass, rowdy. Kubrick is after something high-toned, and he puts up numerous high-culture …
Melville's scrivener, and passive resister, transported into the present day and into a candy-colored burlesque. He remains recognizable, but loses much of his famous "humanity." David Paymer hits the right notes, at the right volume, as his bewildered boss. With Crispin Glover, Glenne Headly, Maury Chaykin, and Joe Piscopo; directed …
The Coen brothers (director Joel, producer Ethan, writers both) cut right to the heart of the role of the artist in Hollywood. They are too much artists themselves, however, to abide any idealizing or universalizing of their proxy on screen: a Broadway Bolshevik (modelled roughly and rudely on Clifford Odets) …
A couple of infantile nitwits (the co-creators of TV's South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, a couple of infantile nitwits) invent a driveway hybrid of baseball and basketball -- but mostly basketball -- and it blossoms into a throwback professional sport, resurrecting the true "spirit of athletic competition." The …
Something went terribly wrong on military training maneuvers in the Panamanian jungle, but what? A coy and annoying mystery of conflicting flashbacks. The torrential rainfall may or may not be an homage to Rashomon, but definitely not a worthy one. With John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Giovanni Ribisi, Brian Van Holt, …