Fact-based German musical, along the conventional lines of the coming-together and breaking-up of a singing group, with the difference that the break-up is the doing of the Nazis. (Three members of the sextet, the Comedian Harmonists, were Jewish.) Unimaginatively filmed, with a misty image and an overload of closeups, but …
Spike Lee would appear to have been watching too much television. Or anyway, to have not yet settled on which of its dizzying array of styles he wants to emulate: athletic-shoe ad, music video, ESPN highlight reel, or issues-oriented Afterschool Special. This fidgety channel surfing will not be stabilized simply …
At two hours and a quarter, this should be an especially big treat for the thirty-four fans, nationwide, of Hal Hartley's stilted and persnickety whimsy. Others will be ready to leave after maybe ten minutes: the precise minute, that is, when a trampy teenager drops her drawers in the neighborhood …
Angst-laden New York story: a drip from the bathroom ceiling leads a doll-faced fledgling magazine editor to meet her upstairs neighbor, a lesbian hophead drop-out photographer in a relationship with a former Fassbinder actress. This third character, played by Patricia Clarkson, is an amusing caricature of a poor-man's Dietrich, but …
The screen biography of celebrated cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, dead of multiple sclerosis at age forty-two, has been a bit battered on musical grounds over the fact that it had to make do on the soundtrack with a cellist other than Jacqueline Du Pré, and make do on screen with …
Undeniably a cowboy movie, though not exactly a Western, set as it is in New Mexico circa World War II. At many points it may look and feel like a Western, with fine nostalgic images of men on horseback, occasional (possibly too frequent) splashes of calendar-art Southwest landscape, an idiomatic …
The unmarried pregnant drive-thru girl at Burger-Matic (logo: BM) picks up some strange sounds on her headset: the sounds of the married biological father getting frightened to death by his two stepsons in a military helicopter. The plot then thickens. The comedy may be "offbeat," but the beats are heavy …
A slathering application of elbow grease in an effort to buff up the marmoreal screen image of Sandra Bullock. But no sort of luster can come through the layer-of-dust cinematography. The opening sequence, in which the heroine gets sandbagged on a Ricki Lake-like talk show with the news of her …
Robert Redford's almost three-hour rendering of the Nicholas Evans best-seller, a gussied-up grade-A version of the staple triumph-over-adversity made-for-TV movie, with Nature Company greeting-card photography and a high-class cast (Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Dianne Wiest, Chris Cooper, in addition to Redford). The adversity arrives in a hurry: a more …
Flimsy feminine dream-weaving, backed by choruses of full-throated cheerleading, from the Terry McMillan novel. Angela Bassett, who starred also in the screen adaptation of the author's Waiting to Exhale, looks strong enough to have endured something more than the phony break-away obstacles thrown in her path as a Type A …
Narrow and dim view of a circle of monotonous Hollywood nobodies. From the David Rabe stage play, which director Anthony Drazan has tried to cinematize through woozy camerawork, claustrophobic closeups, dialogue strung out over cell phones, and other futilities. To sum it up in a pet phrase of the cast …
Rattletrap showcase for Jessica Lange as a cracked Southern belle, pealing one-note laughs from deep in her throat, a wicked mother-in-law with selfish designs on Gwyneth Paltrow's fetus. The photography goes in and out of soft focus, as if it were the work of two different crews with two different …
Conformist independent film "written, edited, and directed" by first-timer Julie Davis, who kicks around some girl-talk truths about the search for Mr. Right: "Every guy I go out with is either a troll, a pervert, or a liar." (Etc.) It can be safely recommended exclusively to those who never grow …
Directed by one-half of the co-directing team of The Big Night, Stanley Tucci, but not half as good a movie. The other half of that team, Campbell Scott, has an expanded role on screen as the monocled and facially scarred Teutonic martinet who runs a tight ship on a transatlantic …