Oliver Stone's adaptation of a stage play by (and with) Eric Bogosian. And, for all the spaciousness of the set, the restless camerawork, the misty, powdery flashbacks, it very much looks like it. Like a stage play, that is. The basic text of it, taking off from the real-life murder …
Almodóvar in awe, all over again, of the opposite sex. (Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours, can be spied at one point as bedside reading, and we might well speculate that Almodóvar would have killed to be the filmmaker who brought it to the screen.) The first half, delineating the central …
When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far. From directors Danny and Michael Philippou and starring Sophie Wilde, Joe Bird, Alexandra Jensen, Otis Dhanji, Miranda Otto, and more.
Will Ferrell vehicle, on the NASCAR circuit, goes too far, too fast, too often, but the excesses are usually easygoing (the bratty brothers' response to the news of their parents' divorce: "Yeah! Two Christmases!"), and the nonstop product plugging is satirically motivated (i.e., dramatically justified), and John C. Reilly and …
Someone has to pay the hospital bill after a fall from the titular topiary sidelines Coumba’s (Dior Ka) older brother. Their father not only deems her time better spent doing her brother’s work than in a classroom, but also (in order to raise quick cash) arranges to marry off Coumba’s …
A rubber-tipped assault launched by Yves Robert on the vacant-eyed bumblers who scheme against one another within the French secret service. A good number of lukewarm laughs are had at the expense of clumsy espionage techniques. Fewer but warmer ones are had at the expense of clumsy seduction techniques. Mireille …
An American actor in London, specifically in his sixth year as second banana to an old-fashioned music-hall comic. The latter role is hideously well done (by Rowan Atkinson), perhaps because the filmmakers are not far removed from him. The main character, meantime, is much overdrawn ("This is my room. It's …
Ungoverned fantasy, from the folks at Disney, about a dreamy twelve-year-old who recruits Pecos Bill (Patrick Swayze), Paul Bunyon (an undersized Oliver Platt), and John Henry (Roger Aaron Brown) to defend the family farm against the encroaching railroad. Hardly seems a fair fight. Nice shot of a sidewinder leaving a …
Contemporary riff on Far from the Madding Crowd, a sex romp of above-average intelligence and in full-blooded color, set knowingly (or if you must, self-consciously) in Hardy country, at and around a writers’ colony in Dorset, where it seems a bit thick of the visiting American Hardy scholar not to …
One of Mary Pickford's few sound films (and rather poor sound at that) has strong biographical interest, at least, in putting her tempestuous marriage to Douglas Fairbanks on screen, four decades before Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton hopped aboard the same vehicle, and in tailoring the Shakespearean roles neatly to …
Looks like Santa left a Steadicam mount under the Duplass Bros. tree! What better way to celebrate than by bankrolling this tale of crossdressing hooker Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) on a Christmas Eve manhunt through the nether portion of W. Hollywood searching for the one pimp she thought would remain …