Domestic dysfunction from Korean director Sang-soo Im. The story is nothing new — sweet naïf gets ground under the moneyed wheels of her employers after crossing the semipermeable membrane of upstairs/downstairs relations in just the wrong way. But the telling is expert, with pacing so languid you almost don’t notice …
On October 30, 1977, three intrepid youths travel across the American landscape, researching a book on unusual roadside attractions. During one pit-stop they encounter petrol station owner Captain Spaulding (exploitation legend Sid Haig, The Big Doll House, Blood Bath) who introduces them to "The Museum of Monsters & Madmen", where …
An over-the-moon ode to Mother Love. A six-year-old girl, having lost her father on a Mayan pyramid, withdraws into her own little world, expressing herself through the plain-as-day symbol of a ceiling-high house of cards. Her mother, the to-hell-with-dieting Kathleen Turner, resists the diagnosis of "classic autistic features" put forth …
The writing and directing debut of David ("Mulder") Duchovny is a coming-of-age film of mortifying immaturity. At its outset, Duchovny is an American artist living in Paris, narrating in that flat affect of his, telling us of a secret which he has harbored since his thirteenth birthday, and which he …
Martial-arts bodice-ripper about a blind showgirl (the jug-eared China doll, Zhang Ziyi) who is neither blind nor a showgirl, but an agent of an underground movement (and, evidently, a 9th-century forerunner of Zatoichi) opposed to the tottering Tang Dynasty. Zhang Yimou's follow-up to his Hero dispenses essentially more of the …
A "caper thriller," if we must classify it, about a team of con artists and the female psychologist (and best-selling author of Driven: Obsession and Compulsion in Everyday Life) who becomes involved in their schemes as scientific observer and then as participant. Stiff, sterile, strange and unreal, suppositional in logic …
Let the grand guignol begin as Ridley Scott goes to camp in his first feature since swapping out Gettys in the scandal-plagued All the Money in the World. Once again the focus is on a notorious clan piloted by a gaggle of pricey lookalikes. Offscreen, Scott’s a stitch, but the …
Tasteful, artful, generally faithful treatment of the Edith Wharton novel. If it naturally lacks the "personal" quality of Terence Davies's autobiographical work — Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes — it at least earns him credit for having selected a first-rate piece of literature. And it does …
The house in question, a modest bungalow within a stone's throw of the Pacific, has been inherited by a subsistence-level housecleaner currently undergoing drug rehab, who gets evicted through a bureaucratic error and her own neglect to open her mail. It is then bought for a song at auction by …
Bille August's treatment of the Isabel Allende novel (with most of the "magical realism" weeded out) might almost be a treatment of a Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon novel: a glob of sentimental (i.e., universally accessible) Leftism about love across the class divide, the belated enlightenment of a stick-in-the-mud, hope …
Prominent designer, futurist, and second World President of Mensa Buckminster Fuller befriended Ellen Burstyn in 1972 and spent the last decade or so of his life sharing with her his philosophies on the care and nurturing of “Spaceship Earth.” A few of his concepts are repackaged for the masses in …
A Thanksgiving get-together of a dysfunctional family with an unhealthy fixation on the Kennedys and especially the Dallas assassination. (We only hear about -- we do not get to see for ourselves -- the costume-party ensemble of pillbox hat and Chanel dress sullied with ketchup splotch and glued-on macaroni. Director …
Autobiographical documentary from Damani Baker.