Juzo Itami's first film (just ahead of Tampopo) sounds on paper to be a kind of Japanese Loved One, on a less comprehensive and more intimate scale, and it thus threatens to be perhaps a little insular in appeal. Half right. First half only. The degree to which it is …
A pre-credits clip of The Petrified Forest sets the time and the social milieu for a slow, morose, brooding gangster film, riddled with Catholic torment and subliterate philosophizing. Abel Ferrara convinces you of his seriousness, as much by dullness as by anything else; and the endless flashbacks tax patience with …
Much of life on Earth is connected by a vast, hidden network that we are only just beginning to understand. Out of sight, between the world of plants and animals, another world exists -- the kingdom of fungi. From the ancient Tasmanian Tarkine Rainforest to the mystical wilds of China's …
Excruciating romantic comedy about a middle-aged man obsessed with making a baby and having no luck doing it. The pain, though pretty much constant, is at its intensest whenever comedy makes way for "sensitivity" (at which times the pain meant to be felt in your heart slips instead to the …
Labored oddity to do with the ungifted son (Oliver Platt) of a famous funnyman (Jerry Lewis), who, after bombing in Vegas, retreats to his boyhood home of Blackpool, England, searching for fresh material but instead discovering family skeletons. Director and co-writer Peter Chelsom puts his stamp on the proceedings with …
Stanley Donen musical, his first away from MGM, to do with a bookworm turned into a fashion model by an Avedon-esque photographer. Bright, colorful, visually inventive confection soured a bit (but increased in interest at the same time) by complacent Philistine notions about such suspicious characters as beatniks, French intellectuals, …
A waste of time. Maybe not for Chevy Chase, who seldom seems to have better things to do, but for director George Roy Hill, who sometimes does have. It's in the tradition of George Washington Slept Here, The Egg and I, and (with a somewhat different tone) Jean de Florette: …
Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Austrian film of a decade earlier is not what it sounds like. Not fun and games, not funny ha-ha, not charades and Mad Libs. It has a good deal in common with his Caché, the clean tidy uncluttered images, the spooky absence of …
Streisand's coming-out party, devoted totally to pumping up its pre-sold star and providing a definitive definition of prima donna. For a story set in the Ziegfeld Follies, there is a queer absence of alternative females. The movie's males, meantime, are reduced, one and all, to passive star-gazers. Omar Sharif in …
The musical Funny Girl returns as a musical.
Coming-of-age tales with an extra dose of cringe concerning a teenage cartoonist who defies his parents' wish for him to attend college and rejects his suburban life, leaving his home and his comfortable, predictable past behind in a misguided quest for soul. Dropping out of high school, he finds an …
A monument of Success Going to One’s Head. The head in question belongs to writer-director-producer Judd Apatow, previously of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, but more widely known as just producer and/or writer, weather vane, fashion plate, brand name, school headmaster. In these capacities he has apparently accumulated sufficient …
Instead of going to a hot boy’s Halloween party, Wren (Victoria Justice) is ordered to take her 8-year-old, bonbon-eating bon vivant brother, Albert (Jackson Nicoll) trick or treating. When first we meet the brawny tyke, he is parked naked on the bowl dropping a deuce while sis finishes up her …
Fast and loose remake by Dean Parisot of the all but forgotten 1977 social satire by Ted Kotcheff, the American Nightmare reimagined specially for the epoch of Adelphia, Enron, and other corporate miscreants. Fast pacing, that is, and loose plotting. Jim Carrey, as the out-of-work executive who stops his financial …