With 133,000 residents speaking 167 languages, the 300-acre stretch of land known as Jackson Heights, Queens boasts the most culturally diverse neighborhood in the world. It’s also the subject of 85-year-old proudly self-professed, “non-fiction filmmaker” Frederick Wiseman's (National Gallery) 40th feature, a mammoth, 190 minute undertaking shot with his trademark …
Discombobulating experience in the vein of The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride, a defense of books framed in the form of an ugly movie. Is the ugliness deliberate? Designed to send a repulsed viewer to the placid regularity of the printed page? The postulate here has to do with …
Matty Rich's group portrait of the black bourgeoisie in the 1970s -- no criminals, no musical stars, no athletes, just Afro hairdos, bell-bottoms, the funky chicken, etc. But the movie is not just devoid of poverty and violence, but of interest and subtlety as well. Which is to say it …
David Lynch never envisioned it as a feature. Initially wanting nothing more than to tinker around with digital video, he picked up a high end consumer DVcam and began shooting a series of unconnected stories. Working without a script, the director noticed an interrelation between individual scenes beginning to form …
This latest observational documentary by Kazuhiro Soda ("Campaign, Mental, Oyster Factory) poetically depicts the twilight days of a village and its people by the dreamlike Inland Sea.
Alan Arkin is a finely tuned comic reactor, in a style that might be described as freeze-dried hysteria, but he is severely overtaxed in a ridiculous spy spoof that subjects him -- a Manhattan dentist, home and family in New Jersey -- to a harebrained CIA agent, an excess of …
Unmotivated remake of the 1979 spy spoof of the same name: the mild-mannered dentist who gets ensnared in the psychopathic cloak-and-daggery of his daughter's future father-in-law is no longer a dentist but a podiatrist (fun-NY), though the heavy-breathing espionage maneuvers are barely recognizable anymore as comedy. You might have thought …
Old-fashioned wartime romance, a bit faded, a bit wilted, but after all it's an old war -- the Great War -- and the romance is the historical one of Ernie "Kid" Hemingway and his Red Cross nurse in Italy. (The leg wound, the near amputation, and the broken heart would …
Filmmaker John Boorman takes up the South African apartheid problem after its solution, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the mid-Nineties offered amnesty to political criminals, provided they could demonstrate a political motive for their crimes, in exchange for their public confession and confrontation of their victims. Juliette Binoche …
Gory odyssey of a self-mutilator who discovers herself, as it were, after an accidental leg gash. This opens up new vistas to her: the spectacle of colleagues eating meat at a business dinner inspires her to cannibalize her own arm, etc. A pretentious indulgence for writer-director-star Marina de Van, and …
Andrei Konchalovsky takes a refreshing route into darkest Russia -- via the unique experience of Stalin's personal film projectionist -- though he doesn't evade thereby the broadest irony and broadest pathos, not to mention the broadest acting and broadest Russian accent (Tom Hulce's). The screenings themselves (Duvivier's The Great Waltz …
They've stolen the idea from Fantastic Voyage -- a manned vessel microscopically miniaturized and injected into a man's body -- but then they've run with it in so completely different a direction as to escape prosecution. The trouble (not to say crime) is that this different direction is too far …
Former lovers rekindle the flame after forty-plus years. Paul Cox's civilized film is certainly an uncommon notion of screen romance (he had given the elderly their due in A Woman's Tale as well), but it is not without its dips into bathos. The simple-minded and largely redundant flashbacks to youthful …
Unglamorous romance and espionage in mid-Fifties Berlin, with a smoothly negotiated turn to black comedy near the finish. Classy, well-made, but undermined by dubious casting choices: Anthony Hopkins, a Welshman, playing the Yank, sporting a loud, aggressive, unconvincing accent (topped off by a jumbo cigar); and the American Campbell Scott …