Not unlike their idols, George and Steve, whose Raiders of the Lost Ark stemmed from misty-eyed memories of the lumbering Republic Serials they grew up on, childhood (and childish) xerographers Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala, and Jayson Lamb were weaned on crap. Why else would the trio devote eight summers of …
Sordid action sludge, pumped for dumb payoffs. Indonesian SWAT cops, with no plan but “kill,” assault a drug kingpin’s high-rise full of ambush traps and collateral (civilian) damage. Giving death and enduring pain are the measures of machismo. The reunion of opposing brothers is ludicrous, and redemption is nowhere to …
Jackie Chan's third collaboration with director Ding Sheng (Little Big Soldier, Police Story 2013) is a comedy/adventure war epic about a railroad worker in 1941 China who leads a team of freedom fighters to help feed the poor.
A group of children are evacuated to a Yorkshire village during the Second World War, where they encounter a young soldier who, like them, is far away from home. Based on a children's book by Edith Nesbit, originally serialised in The London Magazine during 1905 and published in book form. …
Respectable torture porn. Decades after the end of World War II, a former British POW tracks down and squares off against his Japanese tormenter. With Oscar®-winner Colin Firth and Oscar®-winner Nicole Kidman occupying prime real estate on the poster, one would automatically expect them to carry this petrified revenge drama. …
Family holiday on the New Zealand coast in the early Seventies. Mom drinks, and has the hots for a fancy-free bachelor with a boat. Dad drinks, too, but stays cool, almost comatose. (Nice still-lifes of the arrangement alongside the lawn chair: bottle of booze, bowl of lemon wedges, plate of …
A kerosene-on-fire combination: the feverish Ken Russell adapting the shrill D.H. Lawrence ("an aristocrat of the spirit," to borrow a description of the protagonist here). But Russell's kerosene supply is running low -- only the occasional squirt -- and the result is not so much repellent as just dull. Dull …
Ken Loach's suitably scruffy portrait of an English working-class Catholic family, the head of which is permanently on the dole, intermittently on odd (even illicit) jobs, trying to scrape together sufficient quid to do up his daughter proud for her one and only First Communion. The material most closely connected …
Another in the line of adaptations of John Grisham's dragon-slaying fairy tales for the morally complacent and self-congratulatory. In this one there are actually two dragons. Number one is a scamming insurance company that preys on the poor and dispatches a battalion of nattily attired attorneys against the idealistic young …
A bath of bathos, with a rubber ducky for occasional squeals of fun. The character of the idiot-savant — a crossbreed of Mickey Rooney's Bill, Peter Sellers's Chauncey Gardner, Bruno S.'s Kaspar Hauser, and perhaps HAL the computer — attains a certain eccentric grandeur, what with his rigorous daily routine, …
A bath of bathos, with a rubber ducky for occasional squeals of fun. The character of the idiot-savant — a crossbreed of Mickey Rooney's Bill, Peter Sellers's Chauncey Gardner, Bruno S.'s Kaspar Hauser, and perhaps HAL the computer — attains a certain eccentric grandeur, what with his rigorous daily routine, …
Francis Ford Coppola's Odyssey-in-reverse about a pregnant wife stealing away from home and husband in the quiet of a wet morning while only the milkman is about, and hitting the road to who-knows-where. Shirley Knight maintains an always-on-edge performance, sometimes quite compelling (a long-distance call to her husband from the …
Janice Engel’s loving portrait of perhaps the most famous liberal journalist in Texas history (there must be a few others, right?) feels a bit like a pitch for a biopic. That is to say, it’s more portrait than story. It spends an awful lot of time on what feels like …
Oppressed, divided women in 1920s China, as viewed through the placid, studied, carefully balanced, caressingly lit images of Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou). These are so intoxicatingly, swooningly pretty as to cast doubts on the strength of the director's convictions. Gong Li, as the Fourth Mistress in the house …