Growing up on the grounds of one of Germany’s largest psychiatric hospitals is somehow – different. For Joachim, the director’s youngest son, the patients are like family. They are also much nicer to him than his two older brothers, who drive him into fits of rage. His mother, painting watercolors, …
A thirteen-year-old, four-and-a-half-foot orphan (teen rapper Lil Bow Wow) makes chumps of a roster of as-themselves NBA stars: Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, Tracy McGrady, David Robinson, Alonzo Mourning, Chris Webber, et al. Is it the shoes? (MJ's childhood sneakers?) Is it the bolt of lightning? Or is it just moonshine? …
Directed by Merlapaka Gandhi, starring Santosh Shobhan, Faria Abdullah. Brahmaji, Sudharshan, Naren, Mime Gopi, Govind Padmasury.
A logical follow up to director Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. From its opening long take — the lead character speaks from outside the frame — Kiarostami's sleight of hand draws us headfirst into this Tokyo tale of purposeful miscommunication and calculated role-playing. (A painting in the film Training a Parrot …
A feminist yarn of personal oppression and liberation set against a background of large-scale oppression and liberation: the Mexican Revolution. (A distant and dim background, most of the time.) The youngest of three daughters, bound by family tradition to stay home and care for her mother till the day one …
God grant me the serenity and the wisdom of knowing the difference between movies and this, the closest we’ll ever come to experiencing someone of Meryl Streep’s caliber in a Death Wish spinoff. The always brilliant, technically perfect Viola Davis stars opposite comic relief Jennifer Lopez as a pill- and …
Good local color, notwithstanding the warping wide-angle lenses, of an Arab suburb of Paris in the post-9/11 era. The breathy, blond, angelic temptress who moves into the neighborhood with her narrow-minded, broad-hipped guardian would not be part of that palette. Her relationship with the sensitive one in a gang of …
Homosexual revenge play in which the delicate Adonises behind the bars of a Quebec penitentiary re-enact a long-ago romance for the benefit of the visiting bishop who lived it. The prison walls soon give way, by force of imagination, to a fully costumed period production on location. It's stagy, even …
When its theme of the artist's responsibility to society doesn't get in the way of its Forties décors and narrative conventions, this Third Reich period piece is possibly an orgy of giggles and squeals, sighs and sniffs for the Fassbinder flock. The quite lavishly scaled-up production, closer to a Fox …
Disney cartoon with a strained and stretched and far-fetched premise, even for a cartoon. A pint-sized extraterrestrial, genetically engineered for deviltry, escapes to planet Earth, state of Hawaii, and bonds with an ostracized orphan. The movie spends a lot of time being "edgy" and anarchic, roughly up the alley of …
A lonely Hawaiian girl meets a fugitive alien who helps to mend her broken family.
A lonely Hawaiian girl meets a fugitive alien who helps to mend her broken family.
Junn (Ching Pei-pei) never knew her late son Kai (Andrew Leung) was gay. So the sudden appearance of the boy’s well-intentioned ex, Richard (Ben Wishaw), leaves Junn puzzled and inwardly jealous of the affection her son lavished on his “best friend.” The stoical Cambodian-Chinese widow refuses to adapt to the …
A classical stage actor (Christopher Plummer), whose great regret is that he never hit it big on screen, sees his last chance in the latest script by his wife (Maggie Smith). But the part calls for a sensitive European, and she doesn't think he's right for it. So he dips …
Privileged moments with the multiple-personalitied comedienne, on stage and off it, over the twenty months in preparation for the Broadway opening of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. But rather random moments when all's said and done, amounting to little more than an advertisement, or appetizer, …