Claude Chabrol, always looking for fault in the bourgeoisie, noses into the closets and laundry hamper of a French provincial family composed of a septuagenarian Auntie (Suzanne Flon, gaining strength with age), a political-upstart stepmother (Nathalie Baye), a philandering pharmacist father (Bernard Le Coq), a prodigal son back from three …
Traditional women's film (mirrors, flowers, telephones, etc.), with a big-boned Joan Crawfordy performance by Marisa Paredes as a pseudonymous romance novelist in marital turmoil. Naughty boy Pedro Almodóvar is on his best behavior, curbing his normal tendency toward outrage, but not his tendency toward tedium. A couple of brief flamenco …
As seen through directors’ Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga ’Scope frames, Ane (Nagore Aranburu) is but an insignificant sparrow of a construction-site manager observed in overhead shots (her back to the camera) or surfacing, if only for a moment, through the crook in a subway-rider’s arm. Why Ane is …
Roberto Rossellini goes back in history, with most of his neo-realist precepts packed for the trip: Francis and his followers are played by actual monks (and very amateurishly, it must be said), and there are no miracles, no heavenly visitations, no encouraging signs from above. The movie's strongest quality, for …
Imagine, if you will, a movie about the brothels of Shanghai in the late 19th Century. (Take a moment. Think about it.) Whatever you might imagine, whatever you might expect, whatever you might hope for, it would almost certainly bear no resemblance whatsoever to the vision of Hou Hsiao-hsien. For …
Lest you have any doubt about why they call it the Rape of Nanking, here is the story of one American man’s attempt to save a group of Chinese schoolgirls from rape at the hands of Japanese invaders in the late ’30s. Subtle, it’s not; but then, war isn’t subtle. …
Alarm-sounding documentary by Irena Salina on the world’s dwindling supply of clean water, the pollution of it with toxins and the privatization of it for profit. Hard lessons taught by talking heads in a fuzzy digital image. And among its many musical manipulations, the film hops onto the “Spiegel im …
The Absent-Minded Professor remade to catch up with the decline of Western civilization: computer-cartoon special effects; a Star Wars-type sentimental robot; two Home Alone-type bungling goons; Robin Williams; etc. With Marcia Gay Harden, Christopher McDonald, Clancy Brown, Ted Levine; directed by Les Mayfield.
Affectionate, almost gooey, look at the world of gay pornography, though with harsh sound and image, cheap and brassy. It's the unsavory depraved heterosexual -- a hunky gay-for-pay hophead -- who causes the dramatic turmoil. With Scott Gurney, Michael Cunio, Roxanne Day, Robert Walden, Deborah Harry; co-directed by Richard Glatzer …
Filmed performance of comedian Gabriel "Fluffy" Iglesias.
Canine reincarnation tale. A highway fatality is reborn in the fur of a Golden Retriever, who experiences vivid but fragmentary flashbacks to his past life. When he finds his way back to his former family, a Ghost-like situation seems to be in progress, with a dubious business partner moving in …
Animation from the Aardman Studios, not claymation, like their signature Wallace and Gromit series (and not Nick Park directing), but instead compliant, acquiescent computer animation, and a compliantly, acquiescently crasser and cruder sense of humor to go along with it. (Traces of which began to creep into the feature-length Wallace …
An actress must piece together the truth of her husband’s disappearance while trapped in a surreal time loop—even as her own sense of reality begins to slip away. Directed by Brendan Gabriel Murphy, starring Shelley Hennig, Shiloh Fernandez, with Henry Ian Cusick, Charlotte McKinney, and Tyrese Gibson.