Annette Bening takes to the role of an aging diva of the London stage, ca. 1938, like a starving lioness to a raw steak. Her range of expression is most impressive (whether suffering the attentions of a young admirer in an elevator or rising to the challenge of an ingenue …
Jerzy Kosinski's adaptation of his own novel about a retarded gardener named Chance, whose only acquaintance with the world beyond his garden has been through his constant exposure to TV, and who is suddenly turned out into that world when his benevolent employer passes on. There would seem to be …
Twisted, tangled, snarled zaniness around a behind-the-times video store, facing foreclosure, in Passaic, N.J. An habitué of the place (Jack Black, at his most demonically possessed) unwittingly erases the entire stock after he becomes “magnetized” while attempting to sabotage the next-door power plant: “I didn’t sabotage the power plant; the …
Voluble but otherwise artless provocation on the subject of a Jewish neo-Nazi. Ryan Gosling looks as if he is auditioning to play Timothy McVeigh, and acts as if he was studying De Niro's Travis Bickle and Max Cady in preparation. With Summer Phoenix, Billy Zane, Theresa Russell; written and directed …
Occultist moonshine, centered around the imported-from-Cuba underground religion of santeria. There is an authentic element of anthropology and cultural relativism ("Name me one religion in which atrocities have not been committed in the name of God"), and more than the usual dosage of psychology, human interest, and "fine acting." That …
Rather bland for Cajun fare, with toned down and easily intelligible accents and a rudimentary dramatic conflict (ca. 1859) along ranchers-vs.-farmers lines. An independent production of modest aims and modest means and commensurately modest achievement. Robert Duvall, credited for unspecified work as Creative Consultant, appears briefly on screen to read …
Witchcraft comedy, fittingly bewitching, from the John Van Druten stage play, exploring extensively the metaphor of love as a magical power, a spell, an enchantment, a transfigurement. Meaningful use of the Bohemian ambience of Greenwich Village (regardless how artificially reproduced on the backlot); smartly cast, from the top-billed James Stewart …
One can easily get lost in the tricky business of signposting the episodes as "real" or "fantasy" in Buñuel's account of a frigid bourgeois housewife's moonlighting at a swank Parisian brothel. (Sunlighting, actually: she's not Belle de Nuit.) The subtitlist for the original U.S. distributor came to his own dubious …
Spanish romantic romp (and part-time political romp) about a Republican Army deserter, circa 1931, who hides out in a household of four nubile daughters -- lesbian, widow, fiancée, virgin -- and who cozies up to each in turn before finding the one right for him. The first cozying-up is the …
Small, humanistic British crime thriller (for all its computers and gadgets), punched up, and almost out, with a baroque visual style of deep perspectives, low ceilings, angled cameras, inky shadows. The heist itself works up some suspense, when not reminding you, with its remote-control ambulatory ashtray, of the Australian farce, …
The very ample one, to be precise, and very troubled one, of Brian Dennehy, who has come to Rome to organize a tribute to his 18th-century idol, Etienne Louis Boullée, a "visionary architect" who actually built "virtually nothing." Peter Greenaway, of The Draughtsman's Contract etc., manages to compress the most …
A pet project of star and co-producer (and otherwise TV talk-show queen) Oprah Winfrey, an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel concerning a tangibly "haunted" black family in postbellum Ohio. The adjustment of former slaves to an unaccustomed state of freedom is untrampled territory in movies, and this one opens …
Modest little WWII submarine drama takes a while to reveal itself as a ghost story: "I'm telling you, there's some bad hoodoo on this boat." The modesty persists, even then, except in amount of perspiration. A couple of eerie underwater sights: a school of stingrays buzzing a team of diving-suited …
Feminist pep fest, or pap fest, about an Indian girl in West London who must weave her way through the obstacles set by her cookie-cutter traditionalist family -- is there any other kind from India? -- in order to pursue her bliss as a soccer player. (Glossary note for the …
Convicted wife-killer, parolled after twenty-two years, cozies up to the daughter who testified against him as a child, and who now has a child of her own. What is the man after? And was he guilty or not? Plodding suspense film with an even heavier-footed climactic chase. Amy Irving looks …