Tim Burton oversees a lavish and garish horror comedy that captures the spirit of Halloween as deeply as, but no deeplier than, the Woolworth's costume department. Not for lack of expenditure. The best special effects that money can buy do not, however, come with any guarantee of charm -- one …
Tim Burton oversees a lavish and garish horror comedy that captures the spirit of Halloween as deeply as, but no deeplier than, the Woolworth's costume department. Not for lack of expenditure. The best special effects that money can buy do not, however, come with any guarantee of charm -- one …
Tim Burton oversees a lavish and garish horror comedy that captures the spirit of Halloween as deeply as, but no deeplier than, the Woolworth's costume department. Not for lack of expenditure. The best special effects that money can buy do not, however, come with any guarantee of charm -- one …
A murder mystery for only part of the way, after which it applies itself to outlying areas of moral curiosity and courage, and demonstrates thereby that emotional complexity is a satisfying substitute for the idle tricksiness and foggingness we are more accustomed to in the crime field. It puts us, …
Julian Schnabel's second film is, like his Basquiat, a conventional, celebratory biopic on an unconventional, subcultural hero: this time the homosexual Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. We take up his story in his female-dominated childhood (the boy lays his head against a tree trunk, stroking it, gazing at a group of …
Richard Linklater, of Slacker and Dazed and Confused, has unmistakably entered the mainstream: a "date movie" (according to Rolling Stone magazine) about a young Frenchwoman and American man who meet on a train, get off in Vienna, and pass one sleepless night together before the man catches a plane back …
Richard Linklater's sequel to Before Sunrise, after a nine-year hiatus: not nearly as long as the twenty years between Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman and its sequel, just barely longer than the delay between Jacques Demy's Lola and his Model Shop. It seems appropriate to reference French forerunners …
Interesting attempt by the eighty-three-year-old Sidney Lumet to keep up with the Tarantinos, piloting a caper film of back-and-forth time jumps and alternating points of view. The caper itself, a jewelry store stickup, is strictly small-time. "We don't want Tiffany's," the mastermind, a drug-dependent real estate accountant (Philip Seymour Hoffman), …
Macedonian-born filmmaker Milcho Manchevski examines the civil war in his homeland in three torpid episodes, separate but slightly overlapping. (Someone, a different someone each time, throws up in each episode.) Feeling is buried undetectably under slick and flashy technique. With Rade Serbedzija, Katrin Cartlidge, Gregoire Colin, Labina Mitevska.
Interracial, extramarital love in unsettled India of 1937. Things take a tragic turn fairly early, and then grind on taking melodramatic ones. Capably directed (as well as photographed) by Santosh Sivan, but heavy-handedly. With Linus Roache, Nandita Das, Rahul Bose, and Jennifer Ehle.
Contemporary war story about a U.S. Navy flier downed in the demilitarized zone of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the posse of Serbs hot on his heels, and the rescue effort thwarted by a NATO busybody of divided loyalties. (Opportunity, there, to reprise the wistful Vietnam refrain about taking the gloves off and untying …
Masked members of a secret club look on at the ravishing of Marilyn Chambers by a flock of lesbians and a black man with the crotch cut out of his longjohns, and, for an encore, by four men on swings, coming at her from all points of the compass. The …
Mawkish, mopish tale of a country bumpkin who comes to the big city and lands a job as a bicycle delivery boy: "Think of yourselves as the carrier pigeons of today." Think of it, for your part, as the Bicycle Thief of today. Except it's Chinese instead of Italian; and …
Robin Williams, in sad-clown mode, skips through history as a caveman, a Roman slave, a returning Crusader, a Portuguese shipwreck survivor, and a Manhattan slumlord. The segments do not amount to much individually, or add up to much collectively, though they all have their tender touches, each one more than …
The feature debut of music-video and television-ad director Spike Jonze concerns a sidewalk puppeteer (John Cusack, looking as scraggly as Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo), whose explicitly erotic production of Abelard and Heloise earns him repeated punches in the mouth, and whose wife populates their apartment with a diapered chimp and …