More than the direction and screenplay, the bulk of the praise for the overall look and polish of the staging deserves to be shared by cinematographer Alice Brooks, production designer Nelson Coates, and location scouts Kendall Waldman and Matthew H. Wiesner. This is how to open up a play for …
More than the direction and screenplay, the bulk of the praise for the overall look and polish of the staging deserves to be shared by cinematographer Alice Brooks, production designer Nelson Coates, and location scouts Kendall Waldman and Matthew H. Wiesner. This is how to open up a play for …
French domestic mystery maitre Francois Ozon.
Eager to leave his dark past behind, Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) leads a quiet life in the remote coastal town of Glencolmcille, far from the political violence that grips the rest of the country. But when a menacing crew of terrorists arrive, led by a ruthless woman named Doirean (Kerry …
Jonathan Kasdan becomes the second son of Lawrence Kasdan, after Jake, to have followed his father into the director's chair. His feature debut is a relationship thing at about the Cameron Crowe level of wit and wisdom, although perhaps that name offers itself as a reference point because of the …
The prospect of watching Clint Eastwood being annoyed, exasperated, disgusted by John Malkovich for an entire movie, and then foreseeably dusting him off at the end of it, certainly sounds like a reasonable evening's entertainment. You won't be much let down. Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent -- an acknowledged …
Satirical postulation of how the U.S. and the U.K., on idiotic intelligence, came together to wage war in Iraq (unnamed but unmistakable). The actors are real pros, and can well handle the rapid-fire dialogue, probably better than the overwhelmed viewer can handle it. The raggedy documentary-style camerawork, on top of …
A Queen sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where the sorceress and her guide, the drifter Boyce, must outwit and outfight man and demon. Starring Dave Bautista and Milla Jovovich, directed by Paul W.S. …
The case of fifteen-year-old Sonny Wisecarver, alias The Woo Woo Kid, who created a small scandal in the last years of World War II by running off with two older married women (aged twenty-one and twenty-five) in succession -- a true story, told with the oleaginous inflections of a blue …
It was about time. After years of promise, flashes of brilliance, stretches of virtuosity -- in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together -- Hong Kong's foremost fashioner of "art films," Wong Kar-wai, finally settles down and, in the popular phrase, puts it all …
Self-flattery masked as self-criticism. Readers of the horror novels of Sutter Cane ("You can forget about Stephen King. Cane outsells them all") are not, let us say, unaffected by them. And readers of his latest, not coincidentally called In the Mouth of Madness (soon to be a major motion picture), …
Thinking he’s a shoo-in for the second-in-command spot at a deluxe French resort, a designing lawyer (Guillaume Canet) whose ambitions far exceed his needs finds his allegiance to his biggest client and boss (Catherine Deneuve) pushed to the limit after another is hired in his place. Skillfully playing mother (Deneuve) …
An open-and-shut case of miscarriage of justice, based on fact. (It might better be named In High Dudgeon.) A petty thief from Northern Ireland just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: Guildford, England, 1974, when a no-warning IRA bomb goes off in a crowded pub, …
It has, coincidentally, a few things in common with mere pornography: the almost nonstop lovemaking; the unwavering ardor and infinitely renewable energies of the lovers; the perfect, lithe, perspirationless bodies of the actors; the flattering, orange-y Playmate of the Month lighting; the voyeuristic, anti-psychological point of view; the standard themes …