Four directors. Four cinematographers. Four editors. And four separate stories, spun out consecutively on New Year's Eve in the Hotel Mon Signor, threaded together with the twitchily inventive comic performance of Tim Roth as the gung-ho new bellhop. His is as much a full-body job as the bellboy of Jerry …
Determined to disrupt the wedding of his ex-girlfriend by stealing her dowry, underachieving, wanna-be rapper Vinny and his neighborhood pals concoct a plan to take her family jewels from a supermarket safe. Directed by Ravi Kapoor. Starring: Venk Potula, Sonal Shah, Sharmita Bhattacharya & Nirvan Patnaik.
"Please be advised," Milla Jovovich forewarns the filmgoer straight to the camera, "that some of what you're about to see is extremely disturbing." Purported docudrama, more accurately documalarkey, about a whispery psychologist, as interpreted by Jovovich, who stumbles on a case of serial alien abductions in Nome, Alaska, though the …
A Catholic alcoholic homosexual novelist, who happens to have the same name as the novelist on whose novel this film was based, can no longer tell the difference between his fantasies and his realities. And little wonder! The clearly identifiable fantasy scenes allow director Paul Verhoeven to throw in a …
Pierce Brosnan, having lost out to Timothy Dalton for the 007 role in The Living Daylights, had to console himself with this. It's the better movie, if that's any consolation. In it, he plays a KGB agent who's assembling an atom bomb in England, with a scheme to disgrace the …
One of John Frankenheimer's potboilers-for-world-betterment, this one about a tit-for-tat rivalry between a U.S. and a U.S.S.R. colonel (embittered Vietnam vet and embittered Afghanistan vet), which begins as an exchange of snowballs across the Czech border and escalates to the brink of World War III. Well past, that is, the …
A cinematic concerto grosso, with a fixed group of friends passing through four distinct high-spirited movements and one grave one. There's a lot we don't learn about these people; and crude and overdone comic writing mingles freely, but not spoilingly, with deft and funny stuff: "When you work in a …
Diagrammatic adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novelette allows very few unstressful moments, such as the one about coming in from the winter cold and savoring a hot cup of coffee in a simple country kitchen. Most of the time, the peaceful Canadian farm is forced to seem terribly sinister, and, …
R.W. Fassbinder's sob story about an illbred homosexual sideshow performer, "Fox, the Talking Head" (played by Fassbinder himself), who lucks into a lottery jackpot and is bled dry by his deceitful, prissy, upper-middle-class lover (as Fox crams a piece of coffeecake into his mouth, his social superior sneers, "If you're …
The goal is an Olympic gold medal in wrestling, but the real grappling goes on between two families: the Schultzes (brothers Dave and Mark) and the DuPonts (mother Jean and son John). Yes, those DuPonts. Poor John (Steve Carrell in a fake schnozz) is a crazily wealthy nothing of a …
An update on the teenage rebellion at the start of the Eighties reveals that only the faces have changed. Four fifteen-year-old girls, reasonably well differentiated from one another, are dragged through an overstated but unmeaningful sequence of events and a storm of fancy photography: pale and powdery David Hamilton "studies" …
Stranger in town: the long-legged, short-haired, fat-lipped Angelina Jolie, introduced on screen, to the whistling and stomping of rain and thunder, in anatomical stages, working upwards from the toes of the boots. "Just passing through," as she laconically puts it, after getting thrown out of school "for thinking for myself," …
The trailer calls it "the biggest rivalry in soccer." Which might be true, since most of the world calls it "football."
A soldier’s distraught parents must simultaneously come to terms with their son’s death and the frailties of their marriage in writer-director Samuel Maoz’s anti-war drama, nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. All the sudden bursts of absurdity — an unfrequented military checkpoint where languorous camels outnumber vehicles, …