Cerebral French comedy about a jilted lover who plots a seduction as a revenge against womankind -- but only as a literary stunt. (The nasty old publisher who proposes the idea is named Costal, evocative of Montherlant's famous misogynist, Costals.) The randomly selected target of seduction is viewed by her …
Despite touches of brutality, this dramatized salute to tireless Burmese freedom leader Aung San Suu Kyi is too ladylike. Michelle Yeoh plays her like a cross between Gandhi and Audrey Hepburn, and Luc Besson’s direction often seems like a civics lesson. David Thewlis plays the heroine’s almost equally suffering British …
Eric Rohmer, practically the poster boy for Verbal Cinema, tries his hand at a special-effects movie. That's not to say that it's any less talky, stilted, static, and stagy than Rohmer's norm: a fact-based tale of the French Revolution, taken from the memoirs of one Grace Elliott, an English aristocrat …
There’s much to admire in indie darling Greta Gerwig’s first solo venture behind the camera, particularly for those willing to overlook colorless screen direction, dialog that thrives on pop culture references, and a pair of running time-padding skits — an anti-abortion pep rally gone wrong and a gym coach assigned …
Special pleading on behalf of a lower-class Englishwoman who, at the outset, has lost four children (of four different fathers) to Social Services. By the end, she will have lost two more (one and the same father, a too-good-to-be-true Paraguayan political refugee, accompanied by panpipes on the soundtrack). A typical …
Rodney Dangerfield coaches an all-girl soccer team plus one ringer in drag. The most that can be said is that it provides gainful employment, or we might flatteringly say underemployment, to the director of The Leather Boys, The Ipcress File, The Naked Runner, Lady Sings the Blues, The Entity, among …
From the Not-Saying-Much Department: this probably ranks as the best of the several screen versions of D.H. Lawrence's classic bad novel. (And the first to be based explicitly on an alternate draft entitled John Thomas and Lady Jane, after the lovers' pet names for their private parts.) Directed with a …
Romance aboard ship, and after debarkation, between a brewery heir called "Hopsy" (Henry Fonda), who is interested only in snakes, and a female con artist (Barbara Stanwyck), who is interested mainly in money. One of Preston Sturges's more conventional projects, which means that its distinction comes clearer in comparison with …
Orson Welles takes a nose-holding leap toward Low Camp with a pulp thriller (narrated, first-person, in Welles's unctuous Irish brogue) about a gullible, ham-fisted sailor who is sucked into a murder scheme, making him the patsy. The cast of characters is peopled by twisted, obscene predators -- Rita Hayworth in …
No one could accuse Robert Montgomery of having no definite idea how to direct a movie in this, his first time at the helm. As ideas go, though, this experiment in subjective camerawork (the entire movie is seen through the eyes of private detective Philip Marlowe, who comes off seeming …
Miss Shepherd, the titular lady — played without a trace of self-regard or emotional grasping by Maggie Smith — does not have much of a life. It’s hard to get much going when you live in a van, harder still when you’re old and slightly daft and imprisoned by your …
The big surprise of M. Night Shyamalan's followup to The Village is that there is no big surprise at the end of it. It is instead a ritualistic playing-out of a prophecy -- a whole-cloth mythology -- and the only trick to it is to figure out who among the …