In the 1968 animated short The Critic, befuddled audience member Mel Brooks offers the abstract filmmaker a bit of off-camera advice: “Do something constructive. Make a shoe.” Better yet, make a documentary about a shoemaker. Dubbed “the Emperor of Shoes,” highest-priced cobbler Manolo Blahnik is the subject of this lighthearted …
Wrongly sent to prison, a cop (Sam Worthington) breaks out, then pretends to risk suicide on a skyscraper ledge as a media and police distraction so that his kid brother and the bro’s Latina hottie can complete a nearby (and highly implausible) heist. This makes him a folk hero to …
Soft-boiled thriller about an alcohol-impaired bodyguard (Denzel Washington) who goes on a revenge rampage after his button-cute charge (Dakota Fanning) gets snatched by a Mexico City kidnapping ring. Long and lugubrious, the movie sets aside a full hour for the guard to bond with the body, dropping his defenses under …
The essential thing to say about the sequel of Jean de Florette, especially to those who've seen the first part, is that both movies are cut from very much the same cloth. For the sake of those who haven't seen the first part, and who might be tempted to get …
Milos Forman's "biopic" on the late Andy Kaufman is little more than an anthology of Greatest Bits: the Mighty Mouse lip-sync on Saturday Night Live, the Vegas lounge singer "Tony Clifton," the Intergender Wrestling Champ, etc. (And hence the complete absence of the entertainer's big-screen career: Heartbeeps, In God We …
Dubious male bonding. A taciturn bank robber, waiting to pull his next job, lodges with a gregarious retired poetry teacher when the only hotel in town proves to be closed for the season. (Where are his several confederates staying?) The two leads -- Sixties pop star Johnny Hallyday, gloriously ravaged, …
Filmmaker James Marsh takes a novel approach to the topic of the World Trade Center, a caper documentary (to coin a genre) on the forty-five-minute funambulist stunt undertaken in 1974 by the Frenchman Philippe Petit, walking a tightwire between the Twin Towers. The events of 9/11 are never mentioned, but …
Why would a black man from Buenaventura, Colombia want to move to Bogota, a place where "the only black people are the ones who clean the shit out of the toilets"? The answer lies in this brief, motile story of low-rent (but high-tech) drug trafficking and its inimical relationship to …
Vacillating bit of make-believe about a genetically improved guard dog, alternately cuddly-cute, silly-corny, pitiful-pathetic, snarly-scary. A brief liaison with a domestic collie (to the Paul Anka tune, "Puppy Love") opens the door to a sequel. Ally Sheedy, Lance Henriksen; written, directed by John Lafia.
Drawing on Jane Austen's life, letters, journals, and maybe even mystique in addition to the novel itself, writer-director Patricia Rozema projects the author onto the heroine to a degree that no novelist worth her salt would abide. (And Austen was a novelist worth her salt and her pepper, too.) The …
Too calculatedly offbeat romance between a seedy guard-dog trainer and a classical soprano: raggedy bits of charm, humor, social comment are all steamrolled beneath rampant unbelievableness. It represents a more-than-twenty-year reunion of the director, writer, and star of Five Easy Pieces -- Bob Rafelson, Carol Eastman, Jack Nicholson -- but …