Noah Baumbach's somewhat disappointing follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, though maybe not so disappointing if proper heed had been taken of his slovenly visual style, the inexact camerawork, the mismatched shots, the gray, murky, dingy color. But still somewhat disappointing, in the central characterizations, for the sacrifice of …
With Catherine Frot starring in a biopic based on the life of Marguerite Dumont — a grandiloquently pretentious diva who has buffaloed friends into thinking the tonsil-jangling that comes out of her pipes is the stuff coloratura sopranos are made of — it’s impossible not to think of the fifth …
Another celebrity biopic, this one told in the words of opera singer Maria Callas.
The production cost of $7,000 has been mentioned with such frequency and insistence in conjunction with this title that one had begun to wonder whether it was a boast or an advance apology. Or a part of the title. Or a big fib. Presumably the $7,000 figure does not include …
Banal tale of how a nice, pretty, pregnant, unmarried Colombiana becomes a mule for drug smugglers, flying to New Jersey with a bellyful of plastic-wrapped packets of white powder: Maria Full of Shit. Plenty of squalid details lend credibility, if not exactly freshness. With Catalina Sandino Moreno, Guilied Lopez, Yenny …
Because every country deserves its own haunted doll movies. This one is extra creepy since the moms get them to help grieve for lost daughters.
It was the mid-‘60s, the era of free love, when Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen met on the hedonistic isle of Hydra. She complained of being the only non-artist in the commune. Little did she know that her “art” was to be serving as Cohen’s muse. (She was the inspiration …
Soviet émigré Andrei Konchalovsky (Siberiade etc.) comes to America and goes back in time to post-WWII, and his vision, or his photography anyway, is unrelievedly cold, damp, and dreary. His story, however, is evidently intended to be full of ardor. The fantasy of being married to Nastassja Kinski had kept …
Squarely in the line of those semi-documentary exposés of the Fifties, Captive City, Phenix City Story, New Orleans Uncensored, et al., although the emphasis has shifted, as the title would indicate, from How Shocking That Such Things Could Happen Here to How Amazing That Anyone Would Do Anything About It. …
Sofia Coppola, possibly drunk on power after the reception of Lost in Translation, has gained in ambition as an artist without really gaining in confidence as a technician. She has all the costumes her heart could desire, and all the access to Versailles, but her color palette is a bit …
“Without Pierre, I’m nothing,” cried Marie Curie after a freak traffic accident claimed the life of her renowned husband. She had a point: not only did she lose the first great love of her life, Madame C. soon learned that, no matter how closely the two had worked together in …
The name Mary Heurtin is as recognizable in France as Helen Keller’s is in America. (Heurtin was born in 1885, blind and deaf, five years after Keller.) Two-thirds of Marie’s Story is fundamentally a subtitled reiteration of similar material covered in the stage and movie hit The Miracle Worker, only …
Live from the Stars of the White Night festival: a story of eternal love, mystery, fate, vengeance, and justice set in Royal India! Plus: it's a ballet!
Writer-director Randall Miller incorporates sizable chunks of footage from his 1990 short of the same name, in the form of flashbacks to 1962, recollected by John Goodman in the present day as he lies dying in the back of an ambulance, victim of a car wreck en route to a …