Even filmmakers of the status of Nichols and May (director Mike, writer Elaine) follow the crowd and go for inspiration to the French, and they do not go for something recherché: the low-brow gender-bender farce La Cage aux Folles. The major makeover: in order to "explain" why an engaged couple …
Even filmmakers of the status of Nichols and May (director Mike, writer Elaine) follow the crowd and go for inspiration to the French, and they do not go for something recherché: the low-brow gender-bender farce La Cage aux Folles. The major makeover: in order to "explain" why an engaged couple …
Somebody down at Computer Casting Service must have been running a temperature when he matched Mel Gibson with Goldie Hawn (or when he matched each of them to their individual roles: Mel's a former hippie who still keeps the faith; Goldie's a former hippie who's now a corporate attorney). It …
Hitchcock's shocker about an avian air attack on the citizenry of Bodega Bay is constructed along the lines of a sci-fi invasion film. Divested of all logic, this assault on middle-class complacency exposes Hitchcock's sadistic tendencies as nakedly as they have ever been. There is a lightening of load thanks …
Hitchcock's shocker about an avian air attack on the citizenry of Bodega Bay is constructed along the lines of a sci-fi invasion film. Divested of all logic, this assault on middle-class complacency exposes Hitchcock's sadistic tendencies as nakedly as they have ever been. There is a lightening of load thanks …
Horrormeister Dario Argento establishes his durable and elegant pattern in his first feature: a witness to a crime knows more than he knows he knows. How and when will his subconscious cough it up? More of an atmosphere, more of an air of mystery, less of a blood bath, than …
The sophomore effort of director Jonathan Glazer, after his auspicious debut with Sexy Beast, is nothing if not ambitious: a reincarnation mystery wherein a somber little ten-year-old (Cameron Bright, the little creep of Godsend) shows up at the doorstep of a newly engaged widow (Nicole Kidman in a Peter Pan …
Offbeat, roundabout love story. It starts out as a kinky light comedy about a Russian mail-order bride in provincial England who proves to speak only one word of English ("Are you a giraffe?" "Yes"), and who uncovers an instructional stash of S&M porn in the bedroom closet. Then, near the …
A minor embarrassment from a minor master: Polanski directing his plump, sleepy-eyed wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, as a megaton Sex Bomb. The setting is shipboard, but any comparison to the same director's Knife in the Water goes out the porthole with the endless narrated flashbacks to a sadomasochistic imbroglio in Paris. …
And the gray area of white bleeding into black, the particular area of interest of the filmmaker-within-the-film (Brooke Shields), who follows around, with a camcorder the size of a paperback, a group of hip-hop hangers-on from Manhattan's Upper East Side: "I have a vision," she proclaims. "I want it to …
The embarrassments of having an ADD autistic brother when you’re trying to fit in at a new school: him running down the street in his undies and into a stranger’s house to use the toilet, him smearing poo on the rug, him popping your new girlfriend’s tampon into his mouth, …
Screenwriter and first-time director Caroline Thompson's repayment of debt to one of her girlhood favorites, the Victorian perennial by Anna Sewell. It proceeds at a metronomic clip-clop pace, and there's very little narrative development: what little there is comes literally straight from the horse's mouth. ("It was cold and bright …
Paul Verhoeven goes back to his native Holland, back, that is, from his Robocop and his Basic Instinct and his Showgirls and his Starship Troopers, back to the subject of Soldier of Orange, the Second World War, the Nazi occupation, the Dutch resistance. A beautiful Jewish chanteuse, dislodged from her …
Emir Kusturica's dense, distended farce centered around Balkan gypsies, a train robbery, and a barnyard's population of geese, chicks, pigs, dogs, besides the titular felines. Lighter than Kusturica's Underground, but indigestible in proportion, nevertheless. Impressive, a little, in its consistent texture and tone.
More than ten years and $25 million in the making, and at those figures, rather a large disappointment. The Disney studio's attempt in the Eighties to reassert itself in the animation field seems to have an eye as much on George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as on Pinocchio or Peter …