Gabo and Trisha come from different backgrounds. Trisha spent about 20 years living and working in the US, while Gabo has been working in different jobs to make ends meet in the Philippines. The two will cross paths when Trish returns to the country. Directed by Coco Martin with Malu …
The homosexual proprietor of a homosexual nightclub, and long-time lover of his star drag queen, learns that the son he sired twenty years earlier in a mad moment of heterosexual experimentation is engaged to be married. Complications, as you would guess, ensue. This is French sex farce of a type …
Enemy agents, multiple stiffs, and a missing microfilm capsule are not apt to strike fans of the earlier movie as constituting the most logical sequel. Still, these fans should get their fill of forced sentiment and silliness on the subject of two aging homosexuals who fit in with no one …
Not about a lacemaker but an apprentice beautician, this sentimental tragedy is quite perceptive, if also rather inconsequential and narrowly focussed, in its observation of the various discomforts that arise from such social crises as when one's roommate strips naked in the public streets, the noises of lovemaking filter loud …
Rossini's music has an irrepressible quality, bubbling up effortlessly throughout this retelling of the story of Cinderella. The invention is unstoppable, from Cenerentola's plaintive song about a king who loves a poor girl to the lavish coloratura of her final aria when goodness triumphs and all ends, for some at …
Cool-headed, steady-handed piece of filmmaking, from Claude Chabrol. The narrative is efficiently gotten off the mark ("Let me explain the situation ...") in a pre-credits scene in which the ladylike Jacqueline Bisset, well at home in the French language, interviews the rather strange-seeming (and always fascinating) Sandrine Bonnaire for the …
Somewhat on the principle of it taking a thief to catch a thief, a French businessman sends a klutz to find a klutz: his own daughter who has disappeared in Acapulco. (There proves to be little difficulty finding Mexicans who can converse fluently in French.) Pierre Richard, as the second …
The story of the mousy white-collar worker who falls in love with a prostitute, made by Jean Renoir in 1931, was remade by Fritz Lang in 1945, under the title Scarlet Street. A comparison would show a sharp contrast between two anarchists who do not have a lot else in …
Everyone has their own Chimera, something they try to achieve but never manage to find. For the band of tombaroli, thieves of ancient grave goods and archaeological wonders, the Chimera means redemption from work and the dream of easy wealth. For Arthur, the Chimera looks like the woman he lost, …
Cielo is a mother whose teenage daughter is kidnapped in Northern Mexico. When the authorities offer no support in the search, Cielo takes matters into her own hands and transforms from a housewife into a vengeful militant. Directed by Teodora Ana Mihai, starring Arcelia Ramírez, Álvaro Guerrero, and Jorge A. …
When money mysteriously vanishes from the cash register of a bustling Times Square restaurant, suspicion quickly falls on Pedro (Raúl Briones), an undocumented cook with dreams of a better life. His relationship with Julia (Rooney Mara), an American waitress battling her own inner conflicts, takes a turn when a shocking …
Louis Malle's initial contribution to the collection of films, growing by leaps and bounds in the years after The Sorrow and the Pity, about Europe under Fascism: a studiously cool and unsentimental portrait of a French peasant who, rejected by the Resistance because of his youth, is diverted into collaboration …
Curtis Hanson's ill-advised adaptation of James Ellroy's monumental junkpile of a novel. He has, in the adaptation process, cleaned up a lot of the trash (the entire pseudonymous smear of Walt Disney), but what's left is still trash, and thinned out as it is, less coherent. The exposition is often …
Solemn post-9/11 tribute to firefighters, although these are Baltimoreans rather than New Yorkers. The central one, Joaquin Phoenix, lies injured and trapped in a burning building as his life flashes before him. Or to be more exact, he consciously flashes back on his life at length and at intervals -- …
The stranger who, in the nervous days before WWII, washes up on the Cornish shore, and into the lives of two elderly sisters, proves to be a Polish violin prodigy, whose sweet sounds catch the ear of a neighboring beauty on holiday, the sister of a world-famous maestro. A not …