Director Baz Luhrmann finds a suitable subject for the riotous excess of his directorial style in the riotous excess of the Jazz Age. By the time the onscreen parties lurch to a halt, you may feel a little buzzed yourself. Unfortunately, there's still rather a lot of movie remaining at …
Reasonably sophisticated (which is to say, reasonably cynical) view of Tammany Hall politics, with tougher-than-smart-guy Brian Donlevy rising from soup line to Governor's Mansion, under the sponsorship of political boss Akim Tamiroff, and then precipitately falling to that most romantic of occupations: bartending in the tropics. Preston Sturges's first job …
Yes, well: the outdoors is all right; it's what happens inside it that's not: another vacation horror story from John Hughes (scriptwriter only, as in the National Lampoon's Vacations, not director too, as in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles). Dan Aykroyd, speaking in a voice pitched for the deaf, makes life …
True story of a U.S. Ranger assault on a POW camp in the Philippines toward the end of the Second World War, though the first-person narrator, the leader of the assault, starts back a bit further: "In 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor...." John Dahl, the director, had had trouble …
Originally released as The Ace, a portrait of "a warrior without a war," a Marine pilot who is something of a patriot, something of a practical joker, something of a family man, and something of a bully, and who has no satisfactory way to burn off his excess energies in …
Documentary about a 6,000-mile ski journey along the Trans-Siberian railway.
Sergio Corbucci spaghetti western about a mute gunfighter (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who defends a young widow and a group of outlaws against a gang of bounty killers led by Klaus Kinski.
It's a sort of poetic injustice that this foppish, effete, fourth-generation specimen of the "caper picture" should crib its title from Edwin S. Porter's hardy pioneer, dated 1903. With Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, Lesley-Anne Down; written and directed by Michael Crichton.
An American movie shot in mainland China (and San Francisco) and spoken in Mandarin (and English), about a family of Chinese-Americans, all three of whom can use chopsticks but only one of whom can speak Chinese, who visit their nearest relatives in the homeland. ("Who are these strange people?" the …
Director Zhang Yimou enlists the friendly All-American face of Matt Damon to entice multiplex audiences to embrace subtitles, the glories of Chinese civilization, and the coming wave of Chinese cinema. (Damon’s face, scowly and granitic, is up to the task, his slippery accent isn’t.) The story feels American as well; …
An unprecedented apocalyptic event on Earth is investigated through scientific, historical and spiritual lenses, uncovering startling truths about the world. Directed by Juan Carlos Salas Tamez.
Boxing satire (think Holmes-Cooney, Tyson-McNeely, Creed-Balboa), at about the degree of polish of a Saturday Night Live sketch, and at about twelve times the length. Nowhere is the similarity to SNL greater than in the hardship of having to scare up a couple of "heavyweights" from a limited ensemble: the …
It’s seldom that the prolific Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy) hits rock bottom, but when he does, expect to exit picking asphalt from your eyes. As much as one applauds the director’s desire to work in all types of film, he easily could have skipped the “toothless …
Von Stroheim's idiosyncratic interpretation of Frank Norris has been cripplingly reduced from its original, ten-hour-long, epic dimensions (now available for study in book form only), but it still reveals a maniacal eye for detail, and it makes up for whatever it lacks in subtlety with a surplus of audacity. Zazu …