Rob Zombie's sequel to everyone's favorite family picture, The Devil's Rejects.
Can a healthy young heterosexual male keep a vow of celibacy for the duration of Lent? Can he get over his old girlfriend and make a true "connection" with a new one in that time? Can we care? Very youthy, very hip, very glib, very one-track-minded, very cocksure. Not very …
The hero is not what he is by reason of any philosophy, religion, or phobia: "It just never happened." But now his colleagues at the Smart Tech electronics store, cottoning on to his condition, are pitching in to cure him of it. Though not unsympathetic in treatment, the character is …
Four chums of a catatonic cuckold devise a plan to help him regain his manhood: abduct the offender so that the offended may exact revenge. An initial hint of stylishness yields to staginess, despite the flashbacks, the fantasies, and the illustrative footage from Cecil B. De Mille’s Samson and Delilah. …
Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years is a two-hander about aging that refuses to walk the generally prescribed paths of shedding sentiment and/or dwelling on disease, and for that alone, it deserves hardy praise. On the eve of a couple’s 45th anniversary, news arrives of the discovery of a body found …
After the pastoral interludes of The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, Walter Hill returns to the urban milieu of The Driver and The Warriors, but his decline since the latter pair continues nonetheless. One of the more obvious differences between them and the present work is the abandonment of an …
A slice-of-life indie-looking movie about a peevish, aimless young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) facing cancer. Except it’s mostly not really about the young man’s struggle with cancer; it’s about his difficulties with girls (Mom included). Once you have that down, it’s easier to see why most of the film seems to …
An L.A. industrialist makes one itty-bitty mistake with a twenty-two-year-old nude model, and a trio of blackmailers want him to fork over a hundred and five thousand. But he'd prefer to tell his wife, even though she's a present member of the Clean Air Commission and a future candidate for …
An ill-timed release, mere months after Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco. Written and directed by a starry-eyed Mark Christopher, it purports to grant us entree to the "real" Studio 54, as against Stillman's fictional "composite," and it predictably and conventionally gravitates more toward the "inside" and the "top" …
An English soldier (Jack O'Connell, doe-eyed and square-jawed) finds himself shipped to a foreign country that isn't quite foreign: Northern Ireland, there to keep the peace in Belfast, a city rife with division. You've got your Catholics and Protestants, of course, but then you've got your factions within each, not …
A Peter Greenaway erudition display, or in other words a film to bang your head against. Arch, artificial (and harshly recorded) talk of sex, death, money, religion, Fellini (hence the title), Mondrian, Austen, Hardy, etc., in flat, rigid, squared-up compositions, sometimes containing antiseptic nudes. The photography (the venerable Sacha Vierny …
102 minutes minus closing credits. A famous forensic psychiatrist (a puffy-haired Al Pacino), on the scheduled day of execution of a sadistic killer against whom he testified, receives a distorted-voice cellphone threat, “You have 88 minutes to live.” Once the countdown begins, not a single minute is remotely credible. How …
Screen debut of rapper Eminem, a pop-star acting vehicle not unlike some of the more serious (everything being relative) of the early Elvis vehicles: Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Wild in the Country. (The Eminem character is even addressed on occasion as "Elvis.") On the score of "realism," one …