A "lost" or anyhow neglected Frank Capra film from the same year as It Happened One Night. (A Columbia film re-released, perversely enough, by Paramount!) All the old gang is reassembled -- scriptwriter Robert Riskin, photographer Joseph Walker -- and Warner Baxter is a more soulful, more careworn, more human …
Defensible perhaps as a Runyonesque (as everyone seems to have agreed to call it) portrait of show people at the lowliest level, a fraternal salute from an established star (Woody Allen) to all his brethren who never struck a spark, an effusive valentine from "Never Too Big" to "Never Say …
Here's fulfillment of any desire for a homosexual cowboy movie, superseding all those inadmissible innuendos as to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Cisco Kid and Pancho, et al. It fills out and plumps up a sketchy, skinny, yet ample short story by E. Annie …
Director Jonathan Kaplan cut his teeth on exploitation films for Roger Corman (The Student Teachers, Night Call Nurses), so it might seem only natural that he would get around to the women-in-prison genre. But by now he's serious and sensitive, the director of The Accused and Immediate Family, so the …
Peppy, bustling, highly mobile action film — all over the Southwest desert on the trail of a couple of purloined nuclear weapons. Hong-Kong-to-Hollywood émigré John Woo, if not quite the master that his cult followers would have us believe, is at least a tireless laborer, and his movie is abuzz …
Almodóvar, as is his wont, gives you splatters and splashes, swatches and swaths, of vibrant color, and he gives you the occasional rock-you-on-your-heels image (a teardrop on a ripe tomato, lovers writhing within a white-sheet cocoon), and he gives you deliberately over-the-top domestic melodrama played steadfastly straight: a blind filmmaker …
Cultural mix-and-match. A beautiful expatriate Croat in New Zealand agrees to a mock marriage with a Chinese immigrant while carrying on an intimate relationship with an indigenous Maori. (Which leads to an intimate scene, just between you, her, and the toilet bowl, of a urine-stream home-pregnancy test.) The tyrannical Croatian …
Jim Jarmusch's mainstreamiest film to date has a lot of laughs in it, despite the pretentiousness of the cinéma d'ennui pacing and deliberately dissatisfying ending. Laughs are laughs, nonetheless, and once they've fought through the pretentiousness, they cannot be wiped off the scoreboard. (Another impediment to be fought through, another …
Writer-director Greg Berlanti brings to the West Hollywood gay scene a knowing eye, a glib tongue, a support-group shoulder: "I was left for a trainer named Dash. I was left for a punctuation mark!" More informational, perhaps, than entertaining ("OGT" is code for "obviously gay trait," and so on), but …
Idealistic paramedic comes to L.A. and goes down the drug tubes, guided by a thrill-seeking ambulance river. A festival of disgust (upchucking in a tank of exotic ish, etc.), with plenty to go around to the filmmakers themselves (interrupting the grubby reality for a dissolve-happy, allad-accompanied love scene). With Jason …
Israeli domestic drama, centered around a morose widow and four morose children, with the wider national issues kept well out of it. Realistic, life-sized problems, relationships, emotions, crises; touching performance by Maya Maron as the guilt-ridden and grudgingly dutiful daughter. With Orly Zilberschatz-Banai, Nitai Gvirtz, Daniel Magon, and Eliana Magon; …
Clint Eastwood as the star and owner of a Wild West show who, even in the face of dwindling attendance and grumbling employees, remains unshaken in his rosy, Roy Rogers philosophy of life, and maintains a special soft spot for the younger generation of, as he terms them, "little pardners." …
Robert De Niro's directing debut -- a chance to dedicate a movie to the memory of his father, and immediately afterwards to give written thanks to songwriter Sammy Cahn. What else? To select golden oldies for a coming-of-age story set in the Sixties; to let a first-person narrator lay the …
Crime drama treats what would be an historically bad week for the NYPD as simply the average run. Amid a series of racially charged shooting incidents, three diverse policemen (the brink-of-retirement beat cop, the stressed-out undercover cop, the off-the-rails rogue cop) pursue their individual paths on what we come to …