Lasse Hallstrom's treatment of the John Irving Bildungsroman of the same name: a Second World War period piece centered around one Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire), an abused orphan -- "twice adopted, twice returned" -- and the chosen understudy to the kindly doctor and backdoor abortionist (Michael Caine) who runs the …
Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi's entry into the world of a blind boy, a triumph of humility and empathy. The boy's openness to the world around him in contrast to his father's insulation from it is a constant theme: the soundtrack, in one instance, quiets down to just the distant birdcall …
Robert Altman tarries a while longer in the Deep South, idly tracing the stereotypical loopiness of the natives. If the movie lacks the pervasive weather of The Gingerbread Man, it is thickly atmospheric all the same, settling into the locale as into an overstuffed easy chair: Holly Springs, Mississippi, at …
Hong Kong-style action dropped like a bomb into a Sidney Lumet-style probe of NYPD politics. The result is widespread devastation. Mark Wahlberg, reunited with the director of Fear, James Foley, who has sometimes been somewhat serious, is the soft-spoken second-generation Irish cop assigned to the Chinatown beat for incendiary reasons …
Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …
Fractured fairy tale (to borrow a phrase from Rocky and His Friends): Hansel and Gretel recast as a French Bonnie and Clyde (he's impotent) who lose their way in the woods after burying a body, and fall into the clutches of a hirsute homosexual hermit. (Because they're French, the young …
Dangerous Liaisons retailored to the bodies and needs of modern American teens: it's still weighted with quaint notions of purity and reputation, but played mainly for catty laughs. (Don't misunderstand. It's not about teenagers who consciously act out a video they've seen, much less an 18th-century novel they've read. They …
Sober little comedy about the determined efforts of exiled Tibetan monks in India to watch the '98 World Cup final between Brazil and France ("France is the only country that loyally supports Tibet"). The story behind the screen is at least as compelling: the first film of Khyentse Norbu, a …
The search for an Alzheimer's cure produces first a trio of experimental sharks of superior intelligence, speed, strength, cunning. And the floating laboratory of Aquatica becomes for the viewer a gruesome torture chamber (arms lopped off, bodies torn in half) and a real strain on the nerves. With Saffron Burrows, …
A swatch of TV-movie material given a big-screen sheen. Michelle Pfeiffer is cast as a Mother Discouraged whose three-year-old middle child disappears from the crowded lobby of the host hotel at her fifteen-year high-school reunion. Nine years later, after an unavailing nationwide search, a People Magazine cover story, and a …
Absurdist comedy as flat as its setting, a godforsaken Southwest town (pop. 87) put under quarantine when an overturned tanker spills the "secret ingredient" of Empire Cola across the road. The literal high point is the World's Largest Ice Cream Cone, the town's tourist attraction. With Brendan Sexton III, Kate …
A nostalgic ramble down the road to a KISS concert (ca. 1978), in the bonehead-and-proud-of-it style of a heavy-metal music video. The unrelenting songtrack heightens the effect. (Co-founder of the band, Gene Simmons, co-produced the movie.) With Edward Furlong, Giuseppe Andrews, James DeBello, Sam Huntington, Natasha Lyonne, Melanie Lynskey, and …
A French farce ticketed, like any of Francis Veber's directorial and/or auctorial efforts, for a Hollywood remake. The title is not a verbatim translation of Le Dîner des Cons, which would (or could) have been The Dinner of Assholes. Said dinner, in any case, is a periodic ritual of a …