Mel Gibson with a lot of makeup. He's a horrifically scarred recluse, shut away in his two-story seaside sanctuary with his poetry, his classical music, his paintings, but distantly hounded by nasty rumors and nastier nicknames: "Hamburger Head," "Pizza Head," "Puke Head." And then one day a backward junior-high student …
The man in question, a wood carving by the name of Markku Peltola, is a train passenger who, in a scene of jolting brutality, gets mugged on his first night in Helsinki and wakes up with amnesia. A quirked-up comedy, despite the rough start, by the deadpan Finn, Aki Kaurismaki, …
Otto Preminger's fevered adaptation of Nelson Algren's heroin horror tale. One oasis of aching pathos: the junkie and his peroxided helpmate improvise some hypothetical Happy Couple dialogue outside a Dream Kitchen display window. Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, Darren McGavin.
Customary good work by John Barry, in the music department, and Ted Moore, in cinematography. But the customary scriptwriters, Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz, seem to have squeezed their salaciousness to the last drip. For the first time, secret agent James Bland (again acted by the ho-hum and rather clumsy …
A kung-fu picture with heart — and guts. Wu-Tang Clan member RZA co-wrote, directed, and stars in the story of a simple blacksmith, biding his time in a violent village, making weapons for anyone with the money to buy them and saving up for the day when he can purchase …
One of the hard lessons of growing up, we learn at the end of this Erich Segal tearjerker, is that nobody is perfect. But people in Erich Segal tearjerkers come close. The titular man, for instance, is chairman of a university Humanities department, bribes potential drop-outs with guaranteed A's, and …
Documentary directed by Chris Martini offering an alternative perspective of Donald J. Trump that attempts to counter his public image as a dictatorial moron.
The monotonous triumphs of a peasant lad plucked from his family in a Chinese village, sent to study ballet at the Beijing Arts Academy, sent again to America to guest with the Houston Ballet, where he experiences first love with an auburn-haired virgin and decides to defect (mild tension there), …
A half-Eskimo boy and half-Indian girl, thrown together and then torn apart in childhood, are reunited and re-separated as adults, in the thick of World War II. They are almost, not quite, reunited again in the mid-Sixties. Vincent Ward's culture-clash epic is vaultingly ambitious in scope though curiously uninvolving as …
A valiant performance from Sigourney Weaver, big, bold, daring, dauntless, yet always fully in control and thoroughly human. (Quite a feat, that, for an actress who can easily seem too good to be true: too beautiful, too brainy, too confident, too strong, too perfect.) But this is a complete movie, …
The team of director Ian Samuels and writer Lev Grossman (adapting his short story for the screen) score points early on for referencing by name Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis’ revered romantic comedy that finds Bill Murray forced to relive the same day. Such is Mark’s (Kyle Allen) fate: a life …
How on earth do you make such an inert movie about a photographer (in)famous for a self portrait with a bullwhip jammed up his posterior, a man whose work resulted in the only time an American museum has gone to trial on obscenity charges? How do you hew so close …
How much mercenary sex, rampant pill-popping, craven inhumanity, horrific violence, and full-on incest does David Cronenberg have to put into his Hollywood satire before you get the point? Really? That much, huh? Okay, here goes. Julianne Moore caps off her recent triumph as Best Actress in Still Alice with the …
Mari Okada's animated fantasy about an immortal girl and a normal boy who meet, become friends, and share a bond that lasts throughout the years.