Something to tide over the jittery samurai junkie till his next big fix: the "legendary" battles between two powerful warlords (one dressing up his troops in black, the other in red) in 16th-century Japan. Confusingly elucidated, with little help from a narration spoken in English by (of all people) Stuart …
Oliver Stone in his appointed role -- self-appointed, make that -- of dispenser of strong medicine. His patented technique: put the patient in a headlock and pinch his nose with one hand, then force a funnel down his throat and pour in castor oil with the other. That's a pretty …
Four testimonies from young people who have turned their lives upside down through the intercession of an angel, Carlo Acutis. Directed by Spanish filmmaker and writer José María Zavala.
Not the earlier version of Warren Beatty's film of this title (that was Here Comes Mr. Jordan), but rather a sentimental stage comedy out of Central Europe, transplanted to Technicolor Hollywood by Ernst Lubitsch. And very comfortably and prettily so. It concerns a deceased roué who demands admission at the …
Warren Beatty's atavistic remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan — he's the star, the producer, the co-writer (with Elaine May), and the co-director (with Buck Henry) — is scrupulously clean, moderately liberal, irreverently reverent, and refreshingly airy. Such qualities were rampant in the Depression years whence this comedy-fantasy came, but …
St. Basil's Catholic Parochial School for Boys, Brooklyn, 1965. The photography is so aggressively unattractive, with that fluorescent abrasiveness in which Miroslav Ondricek specializes, that you might almost think the movie took itself seriously. Perish the thought. Every character is one insistent note, strident if not downright sour: fat bespectacled …
Aaron Cohen documents the stories of 13 Holocaust survivors and their experience with one remarkable man who sought to share hope and humanity in a hopeless, inhuman place. In English and Czech.
Based on the book Heaven is for Real, the story of a boy who has a near death experience and comes out of it saying he went to heaven and knowing stuff that he shouldn't be able to know. Just imagine the terrifying sequel if it's a hit: Hell Is …
True-crime story, out of New Zealand, about two early-adolescent schoolgirls who form an "unwholesome attachment" and who bludgeon one of their mothers to death when the two of them are about to be forcibly pried apart. Directed with enormous energy by Peter Jackson, of Dead-Alive fame or infamy, it is …
Another of the finely drawn comic portraits in the capacious Peter Sellers gallery: this one of a cleric who brings only turmoil where he means to bring bliss. Not untypically, the picture around him -- a sort of blander Nazarin, a religious satire with its teeth in a glass beside …
The first big-screen treatment of one of the Lt. Dave "Streak" Robicheaux detective novels of James Lee Burke, shorn of much of his literary pretension. The image -- the proverbial picture that's worth a thousand words -- eliminates the need for all that knee-deep verbiage, all that slogging scrutiny of …
Teen romance in the Fifties, as revealed through movie and TV clips, newsreels, sex-education films, and present-day interviews. Many of the interviewees (very hip, in sharp contrast to the square archive footage) are too young to have done much dating and mating in the Fifties, so maybe the topic is …
The creators of the Fritz the Cat cartoon, writer-director Ralph Bakshi and producer Steve Krantz, climb up the biological ladder from R. Crumb's animals to some rather rubbery, cute, caricatured humans in the Popeye and Bluto mold. There is still the contented wallowing in Big Town blues, and the consorting …