An L.A. industrialist makes one itty-bitty mistake with a twenty-two-year-old nude model, and a trio of blackmailers want him to fork over a hundred and five thousand. But he'd prefer to tell his wife, even though she's a present member of the Clean Air Commission and a future candidate for …
An ill-timed release, mere months after Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco. Written and directed by a starry-eyed Mark Christopher, it purports to grant us entree to the "real" Studio 54, as against Stillman's fictional "composite," and it predictably and conventionally gravitates more toward the "inside" and the "top" …
Fellini's ever intriguing interweave of fantasy and reality, having to do with the drains on a fictional movie director's creativity. Parasites, vampires, angels, ghosts, and grotesques drift weightlessly through the hero's real and imaginary life, moving as if on floats or on turntables -- this remarkable new groove for Fellini …
A Peter Greenaway erudition display, or in other words a film to bang your head against. Arch, artificial (and harshly recorded) talk of sex, death, money, religion, Fellini (hence the title), Mondrian, Austen, Hardy, etc., in flat, rigid, squared-up compositions, sometimes containing antiseptic nudes. The photography (the venerable Sacha Vierny …
A dramatization of the twenty-year correspondence between New York litterata Helene Hanff and a London book dealer she never met. This basic material, with its excessive necessity for voice-over recitations, will hardly commend itself beforehand as very intrinsically cinematic; and the deep-rooted reverence for books at the core of it …
102 minutes minus closing credits. A famous forensic psychiatrist (a puffy-haired Al Pacino), on the scheduled day of execution of a sadistic killer against whom he testified, receives a distorted-voice cellphone threat, “You have 88 minutes to live.” Once the countdown begins, not a single minute is remotely credible. How …
Screen debut of rapper Eminem, a pop-star acting vehicle not unlike some of the more serious (everything being relative) of the early Elvis vehicles: Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Wild in the Country. (The Eminem character is even addressed on occasion as "Elvis.") On the score of "realism," one …
It starts out in the precinct of Joseph Wambaugh's Police Story — L.A. cop shoots and kills petty drug dealer, goes on an extended bender, loses his family, emerges months later at A.A. meetings — but it soon veers off toward more routine TV cop shows. Director Hal Ashby has …
A family-man gumshoe follows the trail of an apparent snuff film (a genre originally dismissed as an "urban myth") into the S&M; underworld, with a Hollywood porn-shop clerk as his guide. Hyperbolic detective story, combining the routine barbarity and depravity of a Matthew Scudder case (Lawrence Block, novelist) with a …
Bio of bull rider and youngest-ever inductee into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, Lane Frost. It's sincere; it's direct; it's, more than anything else, narrowly focussed: parents, a couple of buddies, a wife, that's it. The epilogue of documentary footage, home movies, and family-album photos persuades us that the …
François Ozon offers up, for specialized tastes, a cinephiliac musical-comedy whodunit, set at a snowbound country house in the late Fifties or early Sixties, with an all-female cast (exclusive of the faceless male corpse). The deliberate staginess and theatricality -- it was adapted from a forgotten play by Robert Thomas …
Post-apocalyptic computer cartoon by Shane Acker, set in a rusty, dusty, color-deprived future. “But life,” intones the rumbling narrator at the outset, “must go on,” even if only in the form of Lilliputian cloth-doll automatons hounded by Brobdingnagian mechanized cutlery. The realistic graphic style displays an endless devotion to tactility …
A film of famous post-production troubles, so watered down in the editing (or somewhere) that you can no longer tell what the hard stuff originally was. Scotch? Bourbon? Rye? Whatever it was, it tastes now like nothing kickier than oversugared and overiced tea: something to do with two style-conscious voluptuaries …
Half-baked hot dish of sex and rock-and-roll, another penetration (so to speak) of triple-X hardcore into the aboveground art house, a plotless chronicle of the burbling passion of two young strangers who meet at a concert and then go on attending concerts in between demonstrations of their passion: tonguing, fingering, …