New rule of cinema: when a character pilots a vehicle down a deserted, dead-silent street for what seems like an inordinate amount of time, chances are a truck is about to come along and simultaneously shatter the complacency and a few bones. Such is the fate of Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin, …
Feministically enlightened treatment of the Louisa May Alcott chestnut -- reason enough to remake it, though it's still a little insipid and nicey-nice. (Ultra-conservatives, however, can take away a rationale against charity for the poor: you might catch something deadly at their door. ) Trini Alvarado's Meg and Kirstin Dunst's …
Director Greta Gerwig reteams with her Ladybird star Saoirse Ronan for a cast-heavy but still nimble adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s story of sisters making a home and making a life in spite of of limited options and opportunties. (Neither Meryl Streep as stern Aunt March nor Emma Watson as …
For her no-nonsense maiden feature, writer-director Nia DaCosta tries her luck at the tested and proven “one last score before calling it quits” crime drama. The result is Frozen River minus the tension. Ollie (Tessa Thompson) has paid her debt to society for running prescription drugs across the Canadian border, …
Roger Moore confiscates the James Bond role with no trace of apology or regret; he is smooth and pretty and unperturbed, and he acts as though always poised for a still photographer to snap his portrait. This Bond escapade — a blithely reactionary tale of British and American intelligence battling …
Writer-director-star Ben Affleck goes for broke and goes bust with an American tale that mistakes muchness for greatness. He plays Joe Coughlin, a vet who learned in World War I that “the rules we lived by were lies, and didn’t apply to those who made them.” (This line, like so …
Almodóvar, heavily armed with his standard pots of garish color, but otherwise rather toned down. The tone, in fact, is quite uncertain: not quite light, not quite serious either, a bit salacious, a bit melodramatizing, totally uncommanding. The filmmaker takes little from the original Ruth Rendell novel: the wheelchair and …
Oughtn't that to be Live Free AND...? Isn't dying hard, in the lexicon of this series, a desirable thing? (It ain't over till the bald guy says, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.") Bruce Willis, a dozen years since he last got into the part of John McClane, is still in good shape, but …
You may not think that Saturday Night Live is funny anymore. But who needs to be funny when you're important? Important enough for a documentary-history-thingy like this one, anyway.
Cozy character piece, against a backdrop of Buenos Aires in economic meltdown, about the relationship of a gentlewoman of reduced means and her loyal unpaid maid. A big performance from Norma Aleandro, to go with her big hair, and a self-contained performance from Norma Argentina. Written and directed by Jorge …
The bad old days of the Berlin Wall and the Big Brother tactics of the GDR secret police, the Stasi. The case in point: a Party pooh-bah has the hots for a celebrated stage actress and, to clear the way, orders some dirt dug up on her playwright boyfriend, an …
Any new James Bond — that is, any new actor in the role — brings with him a golden opportunity to take stock, make changes. And Timothy Dalton, who herewith relieves Roger Moore of duty, certainly talked a good game in advance interviews. But why, if it was deemed a …
Amateur Night at the Movies. But would it ever have been exhibited even then -- would there ever have been such a night in the first place -- if the movie couldn't have been subsumed under the banner of the New Gay Cinema or the Gay New Wave or the …
The follies of low-budget independent filmmaking, broken down into three separate chapters. The first two turn out to be dreams, of the director and the leading lady respectively, and the third depicts the actual shooting of a dream. Paradoxically, the first two have a firmer grip on hard realities -- …