Writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell adapts his own off-Broadway musical (songs by Stephen Trask), a voyage of self-acceptance for an East German immigrant and transsexual glam-rocker (or "transexual" according to a mock tabloid headline on display), with a botched sex-change operation that has left him a seventh of a man. The …
Relatively speaking, this has to be considered David Mamet's most commercial piece to date. Relative, that is, to one starring Joe Mantegna or William H. Macy. A cast headed by Gene Hackman and Danny DeVito, in addition to Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife), and Ricky Jay (a …
Visited by impure thoughts, a yeshiva student in Tel Aviv drops in at the Love Boat strip club, and within five minutes has fallen head over heels for "Sasha," a Ukrainian hooker. Tawdry tale with earnest intent, including a nod at Mideast politics. The male actors consistently come up short. …
A prosperous, emotionally remote gerontologist (Charles Berling) provides room and board for his indigent, estranged father (Michel Bouquet, looking very old, looking almost more like the old Laurence Olivier than like the younger Michel Bouquet), a French colonialist doctor expelled from Africa. Well-manicured domestic drama, sensitive, pensive, anguished, and quite …
Something like the twentieth feature film of the nonagenarian Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, still largely unknown in the U.S. In the circumstances, it would be churlish to say that it's a trifle boring: far better to be bored by a ninety-three-year-old who makes a film to please only himself …
Former lovers rekindle the flame after forty-plus years. Paul Cox's civilized film is certainly an uncommon notion of screen romance (he had given the elderly their due in A Woman's Tale as well), but it is not without its dips into bathos. The simple-minded and largely redundant flashbacks to youthful …
One of the rare late-period Godard films to be circulated commercially over here. Why this one? Virtually -- or maybe we should say virtuously -- void of narrative (something to do with memory, history, and a fictitious filmmaker's inchoate project on love and the ages of man), arid, abstemious, prickly, …
A dealing-with-tragedy movie (a summer romantic idyll turned violent) with dangerous tendencies toward a Lifetime Channel original. But first-time director Todd Field proves himself to be a true director, cunning in his omissions, his obliqueness, his attention to off moments, his focus on marginal details: the family photos in the …
Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) and director Patrice Chereau (Queen Margot, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) combine to bring the British kitchen sink into the French boudoir. Or vice versa. Two Angst-ridden Londoners -- a bartender and a small-time actress, the …
Small bore, with big ambitions, about a dark-eyed dark-haired high-school grad (the blandly pretty Jordana Brewster) who follows the European trail of her blue-eyed blond sister (Cameron Diaz), accompanied on the soundtrack by an aggressively sensitive New Age guitar, to find out why the elder one killed herself. The present-tense …
Dramatization of John Bayley's two tributes to his novelist wife, Iris Murdoch: Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris. The back-and-forth between early Iris (Kate Winslet) and Alzheimer's Iris (Judi Dench) keeps the film from ever quite getting going, though there's an undeniable poignancy in the spectacle of a meticulous …
Danish romantic comedy made in strict adherence to the Dogma '95 guidelines for unwatchable cinematography. Pity, because the loose-knit cast of characters -- a widowed pastor, a cranky restaurateur, a shy hotelier, a clumsy baker, a somber hairdresser, and a sunny Italian waitress -- is not without its charms and …
Brutally boring road movie revolving around a feckless karaoke singer (Jon Gries), his unbeneficial manager (Garrett Morris), and a sententious unseen narrator (Patrick Bauchau): "Observation and perception are two separate things." Mark and Michael Polish, the twin brothers responsible for Twin Falls, Idaho (co-writing it while Michael alone was directing …
Inbred Kevin Smith comedy arranges a kind of get-together of the casts of his four earlier comedies -- Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Shannen Doherty, Joey Lauren Adams, Brian O'Halloran, etc. -- but with the titular slackers (Jason Mewes, disturbingly credible, and Smith himself, disturbingly not) brought …
Sophomoric horror show about a couple of college kids -- a bickersome brother and sister -- terrorized by the bogeyman, no less, on a lonely country road that connects to an incongruously populous diner and police station. Limited means and imagination, though a surplus of let's-put-on-a-show enthusiasm. With Justin Long …