Ménage à trois in pre-WWII Paris, composed of a flighty bi-national socialite ("You're very modern, aren't you?"), a socially conscious Irishman, and a crippled dancer in exile from Spain: Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend, Penelope Cruz, in order. The recipe caters to the apparently bottomless appetite in art houses for period …
Chris Rock herewith puts himself in the category, if not the league, of Chaplin, Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen: the comic-hyphen-director, if not the comic-hyphen-auteur. A Capra-esque Little Man comedy, a Rocky of the political arena, it casts Rock as a piddling D.C. alderman who, on the strength of a …
Is the cute guy in the apartment across the way a Mr. Right or a psycho killer? (Will four fashion-model roommates be any help in finding out?) Old-hat romantic comedy, with a splash of "gross-out humor" for modernity. It lives or dies on the personal appeal of its stars, a …
A shrewish Bordeaux housewife pitches out the window while hanging drapes. Either the henpecked husband, who was near enough at the time, pushed her or he didn't. Not a lot there for detection. So let's make the detective a middle-aged widower too, for a bit of hunter/hunted personality transference, and …
Filipino horror film about evil doppelgängers. Vilma Santos, Kim Chiu and Pokwang.
Hearing is Believing introduces viewers to the life and music of the multitalented 23-year-old musician and composer, Rachel Flowers.
Ruddy-cheeked comedy about the proprietor of a cheesy Liverpool nightclub hunting down a "wanted" Irish tenor and tax evader. Some facile and felicitous directorial touches (first-timer Peter Chelsom), though the closeups of a lip-synching Ned Beatty aren't among them. And the entire ending pushes too hard, against a too stout …
Elementary suspenser: stolen rare coin, crooked cop, deaf lady in distress. (We have already had a blind lady in distress in a suspenser called -- wouldn't you know? -- See No Evil.) Instruction on the world of the deaf rises just enough above elementary to show you how to sign …
Four casualties of a bus accident are condemned, for an indefinite period and unknown reasons, to keep company with the newborn whose arrival on earth coincides with their departure: they're invisible and inaudible to everyone but him, and they disappear from him as well when he reaches the age of …
Puri Jagannadh takes his Puri Jagannadh Touring Talkies to Spain for this story of how "falling for girl is fun but being in love is pain."
Somewhere it has been said that this is an insult to Jack Kerouac. But except for that, there is not a lot to recommend the movie; and even that would seem a stronger point if one could be surer that Jack Kerouac would have been pervious to insult. The not-a-lot …
A tricky and stylishly crafted movie from Montreal’s Xavier Dolan about a love triangle of which one side (surfer-ish blond hunk Niels Schneider) is the most desired but least loving. Drooling for him are a gay hipster (Dolan) and his sardonic, straight friend (Monia Chokri) in a splatter pattern of …
Sci-fi comedy for devotees seven and under. Two state-of-the-art androids (Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters under thick coats of lacquer) go AWOL from the repair shop, accompanied by a cruder, joke-telling robot called Catskill, and pursued by something called Crimebuster, a Panzer-like contraption equipped with blaring loudspeaker and blazing guns. …
Commercial French comedy ideal for a Hollywood remake. A professional breaker-upper, with strict principles, takes only cases of unknowingly unhappy women and never stoops to sexual relations to liberate them. The focal case is atypical: the woman by all measures seems happily engaged, and her rich handsome devoted fiancé is …