A rarefied chamber piece for a small-town single mom, her pensive little boy, her nomadic no-account brother (their parents, as we're shown in a childhood prologue, were killed in an auto accident, and there's no indication of who filled that role afterwards), her soft-mannered hard-assed new boss at the bank, …
There was a time in the mid-’90s when people would have killed to be David Arquette. With the rapidity of a Gatling gun, he cranked out what appeared to be a trio of career-determining performances: the jaundiced rebel in Robert Rodriguez’s Roadracers (the director’s rapid-fire teensploitation contribution to Showtime’s fine …
The documentary is "based on security camera footage from an encounter in Guantanamo Bay between a team of Canadian intelligence agents and Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, then a 16-year-old detainee."
Adam Sandler’s Israeli accent (plus his stammering multiple negatives: “No-no-no-no-no”) seems like a sufficient base for a spy comedy revolving around a hirsute agent of Mossad, a sort of anti-Munich if you please. But the jokes stray a long way off the base and in diverse directions: the hero’s superhuman …
When I arrived for the screening of Nicole Holofcener's new film, I was asked, "Are you here for the grown-up movie?" It's easy to see why: here we have a story about ordinary people dealing with ordinary problems in ordinary fashion — well, almost. (Can anyone living in NYC luxury …
Eastern European mobster sets up sham marriage between his lovely daughter and, get this, a pet photographer, in order to get her U.S. citizenship. Complications ensue. Rob Schneider! Kathy Bates! Katherine McPhee! Mena Suvari! If you watch the trailer and don't feel like you've seen the film already, then this …
The unemployed, unemployable best man (identified by the initials "BM" on his jacket) moves in with his newlywed old buddy, a situation rich in annoyance, dirt-poor in amusement. The casting of Owen Wilson as the adult slacker guarantees the rich gets richer, the poor poorer. With Matt Dillon, Kate Hudson, …
Zola-esque wallow in animal lust and criminal injustice, set in the place and period of the kitchen-sink movement, the late Fifties on a Scottish coal barge. (The amoral ladykilling hero is called Joe, like the one in Room at the Top, but without the upward mobility.) The actual source is …
Diablo Cody, staking her claim as the Voice of Generation X, brings us the story of a young-adult author (well, a ghostwriter named Mavis, gamely played by Charlize Theron) who tries to go home again. You’d think — cynical, savvy X-er that Mavis is — she would know better. But …
One of the less frequently mentioned (or seen) of Hitchcock's early British thrillers -- maybe just because the title contains less of a tingle. The rest of it contains as many tingles as any. The basic circumstance of a manhunt for an innocent man, himself hunting for the guilty man, …
An enterprising ragamuffin (newcomer Kyle Catlett) from Montana (by way of the director’s The City of Lost Children) takes a road trip. Destination: the lost District of Columbia for a Smithsonian gala in his honor. A halcyon maze, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s shrewdly sweet-tempered surreal fantasyland is an eyegasmic saturnalia of expressive …
Parisian provocateur Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool, Time to Leave) again fixes his clinician’s gaze on the business of lust to further explore his pet preoccupations of identity and sexuality among teenage adolescents. In Isabelle’s (Marine Vacth) case, sexuality is allied with neither money nor feelings. Nor is the privileged schoolkid …
A stiff test of foreigners' tolerance for Aussies. Paul Hogan's Crocodile Dundee got by; the tolerance threshold is evidently high. Maybe Yahoo Serious, with his finger-in-the-electrical-socket hairdo and his pubescently cracking voice, can slip under, too. The idea (Serious wrote and directed as well: hence the opening credit, "A Serious …