An anecdotal ragbag detailing the life of a "skint" Catholic family in Depression-era Liverpool, principally from the point of view of the stuttering seven-year-old title figure (Anthony Borrows, a fresh face, almost featurelessly smooth in repose, expressively dented in action). The fear-mongering Catholicism is laid on a bit thick, even …
feature-length documentary that tells the story behind Liam Gallagher's return to Knebworth as a solo artist, which saw 170,000 fans attend two sold-out shows. With extensive concert and exclusive backstage footage from the same stage where Oasis performed the historic 1996 shows.
Diagnosis of this second specimen from writer-director John Sayles is much the same as for Return of the Secaucas Seven. The facile, fast-shuffle dialogue is very much at odds with the shoddy mise-en-scène, and very much outside the capabilities of the amateurish cast. The best delivery of a line (and …
A viable idea: an inveterate prevaricator is compelled, because his moptop son wishes it on five birthday candles, to tell the truth for twenty-four hours. But the performance of Jim (One-Gear) Carrey is so muscle-strainingly, vein-bulgingly exaggerated it's as if he's explaining the idea to kindergartners. Which in a way …
Restoration period piece. Charles II of England (John Malkovich in a false nose) beseeches the Second Earl of Rochester (a rock-starry Johnny Depp) to quit wasting his energies on debauchery and to put them into becoming the king's Shakespeare: "Give me a major work of literature." What the sovereign is …
Barry Levinson goes back to Baltimore, back to the setting of his Diner and Avalon, back to the Fifties, back to the bygone days of school prayer, segregation, and striptease with pasties, in order to remember what it was like to find out that the whole world was not Jewish. …
Unprecedentedly sordid (and gory) James Bond caper, hardly a Bond caper at all, really more a Mike Hammer-ish private vendetta, and certainly not Her Majesty's official business: overthrowing a drug king in mythical Isthmus City. Shedding the espionage apparatus simply tends to expose our hero's parentage of the one-man-army genre. …
Arthur Dong, victim himself in an incident of gay-bashing, gathers up documentary evidence on several murders of homosexuals: gruesome crime-scene photos; police-interrogation video; interviews with the killers in prison. The picture that emerges is far from clear (it might be surprising, or might not, how many of the killers have …
Whither were thee in ‘73? Watching American Graffiti. It's no coincidence that Paul Thomas Anderson nostalgic tale of coming of age in the Valley opens the same year as George Lucas’ terrestrial masterwork (and with a filched cherry bomb in the boy’s room). The controversial age gap between our heretofore …
Rancid little "indie" begins in Larry Clark territory (teen larceny, incest, voyeurism, profanity -- what, no drugs?), adds the ingredient of middle-age pedophilia ("I'm the best cocksucker in the whole Western Hemisphere"), but then tapers off into mere tedium. The title is an abbreviation of the Long Island Expressway as …
A declaration of love to writer Thomas Brasch, an obsessive dreamer and rebel whose very first play is banned. Starring Albrecht Schuch.
Low-budget "vanity" film written and directed by, and starring, Wally White, about a gay Manhattanite (looking like a cross between Tom Hulce and Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin) who joins the summer pilgrimage to Provincetown. The technique is self-depreciatively informal and playful (lots of chatting to the camera, lots of mimicry …
Ted Allan's autobiographical screenplay about boyhood in a Russian-Jewish tenement in 1920s Montreal (with Allan himself appearing as the Leninist proselytizer, Mr. Baumgarten) inclines a little toward the schmaltzy. And no matter how true to the remembered facts, the story spends considerable time among things predictable and inevitable. The little …