The point of departure is truly inspired: a young Australian woman's religious conversion while on holiday in India, and the scandalized reactions of her middle-class suburban family back home, the most severe of which is to enlist the help of a recommended deprogrammer: "The number-one exit counselor in America." The …
Family man Saeed embarks on his own religious quest to “cleanse” the holy Iranian city of Mashhad of immoral and corrupt street prostitutes. After murdering several women, he grows ever more desperate about the lack of public interest in his divine mission.
This film plays as part of the San Diego Latino Film Festival. According to the festival brochure, "Enrique Metinides is a photographer whose images have captured the aftermath of some of Mexico’s most devastating accidents. Through Metinides’s candid photos and the work of the contemporary tabloid photographers, Mexico City becomes …
Hallie Meyers-Shyer, daughter of Nancy Myers (What Women Want, It's Complicated) steps behind the camera for the first time on this Reese Witherspoon comedy. Here's hoping the apple fell at least 20 football fields from the tree.
Underimagined fairy tale about the runt of the household who gets accidentally left behind when the family takes off for France, fends for himself, fends off burglars (à la Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs), grows, in short, into a little man. It might just have worked if the filmmakers had …
All right, okay, fair enough: Kevin again gets separated from the McCallister clan at Christmas (they get on the plane to Miami; he follows the wrong trenchcoat onto a plane to New York). But then he again runs into the same two thieves (escaped from prison and a long way …
Satyajit Ray's chamber piece about the stirrings of feminism and nationalism in colonial India. Victor Banerjee of A Passage to India is the wealthy, Westernized maharajah, with liberal and rational attitudes. (And very good in the role, too.) Opposed to the notion of purdah, or the seclusion of women in …
The filmmaking debut of stage director Michael Mayer cannot much profit from the line of promotion stressing its shared origins in the author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham. It's true that the storyline spans a number of years, though nowhere near generations, the principal upshot of which is that the …
Action thriller based on a true story about an evacuation of Chinese citizens after a war breaks out in a North African country. Directed by Xiaozhi Rao, starring Zhang Yi, Karry Wang, and Tao Yin.
The second feature film to be directed by Jodie Foster (this time behind the camera only) is a moderately eccentric comedy about the horrors of a Thanksgiving family gathering. The material is sufficiently universal that, at some point or points, it is bound to come within tickling distance of just …
The unmarried pregnant drive-thru girl at Burger-Matic (logo: BM) picks up some strange sounds on her headset: the sounds of the married biological father getting frightened to death by his two stepsons in a military helicopter. The plot then thickens. The comedy may be "offbeat," but the beats are heavy …
In the middle of a holiday moviegoing season fraught with yarns of slavery, childhood mortality, cancer, senility, and an AIDS panacea as a cash cow, it’s amazing how refreshing a cheesy exploitation film can sound. Taking sole screenwriting credit, Sylvester Stallone lumps together shreds of his past glories to form …
Collegiate comedy about a discombobulated film student who receives direction from a Svengali-ish visiting professor (Kirk Douglas) on how to avoid being "a bit player in your own life." To call it sophomoric might mistakenly indicate a satisfactory level of achievement. Better to call it pitifully unfunny, and leave nothing …