Todd Haynes blows another cloud of mist into the mystique of Bob Dylan. The filmmaker, who once enlisted Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story, now borrows a gimmick used by Todd Solondz in Palindromes, employing a rotation of dissimilar actors to play a single role, a multiplication of …
Overfurnished production of the Oscar Wilde farce: so much artifice does not require so much circumstantiation. And the jaunty, jazzy musical score is meddlesome at best, muffling at worst. (In any case it has not remedied the play's sag in the second act.) But the good lines are plentiful, and …
I guess it's especially important to be earnest on stage? Starring David Suchet as Lady Bracknell.
The title of the Christopher Frank novel on which this film was based is the same as that of the François Truffaut film, Day for Night (La Nuit Américaine), but the vision of show people contained herein, and of humanity as a whole, is decidedly darker than Truffaut's. In this …
An account of a family caught, with tens of thousands of strangers, in the mayhem of one of the worst natural catastrophes of our time.
A talky talking-heads documentary, but one that spins a tale dizzying enough to keep the drama going (with a little help from old home video and dramatic re-enactment). When Nicholas Barclay was 13, he disappeared from the streets of San Antonio. Three and a half years later, his family gets …
Arid and affected Camp treatment of a Maltese Falcon-like treasure hunt, headed by a couple of very bad actors in the roles of twin magicians, willingly conforming to one of the foremost homosexual stereotypes. They might be more bearable if their lines were anywhere near as amusing as their self-pleased …
An identity question is posed. (Is Spencer John Olham a weapons scientist or is he an alien replicant with a bomb for a heart?) A chase ensues. And continues for the duration. Frenetic direction by Gary Fleder, in a dark blue fog. With Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D'Onofrio, Mekhi …
Directed by one-half of the co-directing team of The Big Night, Stanley Tucci, but not half as good a movie. The other half of that team, Campbell Scott, has an expanded role on screen as the monocled and facially scarred Teutonic martinet who runs a tight ship on a transatlantic …
Jackass for stupid people.
The beginnings of the great affair between pants-wearing, cigar-smoking George Sand (pseud.) and pasty-faced, consumptively coughing Frédéric Chopin (she falls in love with the music before she first catches sight of the man -- truly a Romantic notion). The largest chunk of the action is set at a gathering of …
Female vice cop in peril of turning vicious herself. Pretty gritty portrait by Theresa Russell; one pretty tense action scene when a drug bust breaks down; one pretty tense love scene; one whopping coincidence, from which the plot never recovers. With Jeff Fahey; directed by Sondra Locke.
Pedro Almodovar's latest is a drawing-room sex comedy set in the first-class cabin of Peninsula Flight 2549. The flight is in trouble — caused, don't you know, by ordinary, heterosexual, procreative sex between a couple on the ground. (She has morning sickness and crashes a luggage cart; he rushes to …
Ostensible documentary on the post-acting career of Joaquin Phoenix by his brother-in-law and fledgling director Casey Affleck. One has to qualify it as “ostensible” because honestly it’s beyond belief. The mere existence of the film adds fuel to suspicions that the change of career from actor to rapper was but …
Margaret Cho -- Korean-American standup comic, erstwhile star of an ABC sitcom, self-anointed "fag hag" and "slut" -- in concert in her hometown of San Francisco, in a clear, sharp, spare image. We've got the best seat in the house, albeit a shifting seat. The material is mostly coarse and …