James Ellroy's theory of the case -- the unsolved murder, disembowelment, and bisection of Hollywood wannabe Elizabeth Short in 1947 -- as expounded in 325 dense pages of fiction, fitted on screen into the film noir boilerplate: the laconic first-person narration of a two-fisted cop (Josh Hartnett), the moody solo …
Ousmane Sembene's slim, lithe tale of a Senegalese maid who emigrates to France to take a position in a bourgeois apartment, and who, her optimism dimmed by the cloistered drudgery, stages a rebellion that takes the form of moodiness and indolence. To make clear the causes for complaint and cultural …
Faithful re-enactment of a 1993 incident in Somalia: the eighteen-hour urban firefight that ensues when an intended neat, clean, in-and-out raid into the heart of Mogadishu (colloquially called "the Mogue," or just "Mogue") goes bad. It delivers a mixed experience, even, you might say, a mixed message: harrowing yet spectacular …
Must be without competition the shortest twenty-million-dollar movie ever made (clocked at well under ninety minutes, minus the credits), which is but one crude measure of how much more money than imagination went into this scandalously derivative and down-at-the-heels sci-fi epic. The bulk of its debt is payable to Star …
Self-consciously but straight-facedly campy thriller (dug up from the heyday of psychedelia -- and the color is garishly magnificent) about the duel of wits between "Japan's number one detective" and a female master criminal who'll stop at nothing to get hold of a South African diamond called Star of Egypt. …
High-tech action film centered around a sportscar prototype -- called the Black Moon, shaped like an axe blade -- which approaches the realm of the futuristic. ("It's-alike-a science feection, no? A jet-a car!" enthuses an Italian auto manufacturer.) The international car-theft ring that steals the prototype, with headquarters in a …
A group of evangelistic nuns fail to make a go of it in a remote Himalayan convent, one of them driven quite mad by lust for an Englishman in shorts. That bit is particularly over-the-moon, and a good bit of the rest of it is at least near-the-brink. But the …
A sophisticated French filmmaker relocates an ancient Greek myth in Rio de Janeiro during the fever pitch of that city's annual carnival convulsions. Not a one hundred percent true image of urban slum culture in Brazil. The confetti color, the voluptuous motion, and the incessant music (Luis Bonfa and Antonio …
In the tradition of The Yakuza, The Challenge, House of Bamboo, Rififi in Tokyo; namely the tradition of Western tough guy in the Land of the Rising Sun. Michael Douglas (who always looks as if he knows he's being photographed, possibly because he is under investigation by Internal Affairs, but …
Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath — and there is no sense here, as there is elsewhere, that he is having to go out of his way to cook …
Bruce Beresford's rendition of a Brian Moore novel about a French Jesuit with a touch of a martyr complex ("Death is almost certain") on a mission among Canadian Indians in the early Seventeenth Century. The subject and setting might provoke a wish that the spirit of Willa Cather -- the …
Writer-director Craig Brewer wriggles at the far edge of the socially acceptable, and he does so with some of the fearlessness of the exploitation filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies: the title itself distinctly echoes Blacksnake, the contribution of Russ Meyer, "King of the Nudies," to the racial discourse. Except …
Possibly the best horse movie since National Velvet and without question the best Mickey Rooney showcase in a long, long time, but not quite as long a time as since National Velvet. Carroll Ballard, a Francis Coppola protégé, makes the story seem very tall, as though seen from a child's …
To his old Arabian home, that is, in a jerry-built plot wherein he is horsenapped by his original owners, escapes several attempts on his life by the evil Kurr of the Uruk tribe (a ludicrous performance by Allen Goorwitz), and, after falling his usual twenty lengths behind, wins the big …