Romantic comedy/drama begins with an coincidental New Year's Eve encounter between a former student and a professor who's at a crossroads in his life.
Werner Herzog happened upon a friend who was screening four films about professional trappers in the Siberian taiga, tradesmen who for centuries have used the same system of capturing animals because they are “unable to invent something new." Herzog contacted its creator, Dmitry Vasyukov, and asked if he could change …
Rupert Everett directs, writes, and stars in the story of writer and bon vivant par excellence Oscar Wilde’s precipitous decline — healthwise and otherwise — following his release from two years’ hard labor in prison for the shocking (shocking) crime of sodomy. Everett embodies Wilde as a magnificent ruin, broken …
A grossly, crassly commercial "indie" in which a couple of escaped convicts boost an RV and are mistaken in the next town for its owners: homosexual impresarios of a kiddie talent contest, Little Miss Fresh Squeezed. From what we see of their masquerade it is hard to imagine how they …
A “What does it all mean?” meditation on life and love centered on an assortment of 20-something, somehow professionals adrift in a sea of somewhat maturity. The principal character is a fashionably scraggly freelance writer who taps into his dormant Good Samaritan upon taking in an elementary-age stowaway he finds …
The violence in animation maverick Ralph Bakshi’s 1977 apocalyptic fantasy Wizards could be interpreted as the director’s excuse to get even with TerryToons for all the cute, cuddly creatures he was obliged to draw while under contract with the cartoon studio. Not surprisingly, audiences stayed home in droves. Even today, …
A happier experience for the moviegoer than for the main characters. The most confident piece of work from Zhang Yimou since his creative and personal split from his star, Gong Li -- since, to be specific, Shanghai Triad in 1995 -- it is done in a masterly but never showy …
Wong Kar-wai, of Chungking Express, Days of Being Wild, et al., demonstrates himself again to be a natural-born moviemaker, or shot-maker at any rate, with an offhand, on-the-run manner that makes light of his prodigious gifts. (The spirit of the French New Wave lives.) He toys here with film speeds; …
The theme is right there in the opening shot: a pilgrim’s parade of trucks and RVs, winding their way through bucolic countryside on their way to tailgate before a Penn State football game. But oh, what’s that in the lower left of frame? Why, it’s a row of trashcans and …
More comic book than dime novel, and more comic book than movie, too. And not all that hard-boiled, for that matter. The opening gun battle attains a body count beyond the capacity of all your fingers and toes, and sets up a recurring pattern of marksmanship whereby incredible accuracy alternates …
Thonggrrrl14 makes a chat-room date with Lensman319, which is to say a fourteen-year-old, pixie-haired schoolgirl and a professional photographer eighteen years her senior, but predator becomes prey in this simple-minded, long-drawn-out ritual of revenge, essentially a two-character piece, an interminable tennis volley of his-and-hers faces, grueling, fatiguing, suffocating. With Patrick …
A teenage girl from Grand Rapids, Michigan, disappears in the course of a Christian youth junket to Knott's Berry Farm, and her father (George C. Scott, very good on the externals of a God-fearing Midwesterner) tracks her around the porno-prostitution circuit of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. Writer-director …