Maudlin loss-of-innocence tale about the coming of the Spanish Civil War to a Galician village -- it doesn't arrive there until the movie is ending -- and specifically to a saucer-eyed little boy who learns a lot, but not enough, from his free-thinking old schoolmaster. The episodic narrative, adapted from …
Co-writers and co-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber offer utterly unrationalized science fiction in the time-travel and alternate-universe subdivisions. It concerns a college student (Ashton Kutcher, with scholarly beard) who had suffered from memory blackouts as a child, and who now discovers that by rereading his diaries he can …
A British sickie with raw, scabby, anemic color to match. It concerns a pathological Thelma and Louise by the names of Eunice and Miriam, or Eu and Mi for short (or You and Me for deep), a homicidal loon and an apologetic simp: "I never stopped looking for the good …
The availability of Brazilian films in this country has shrivelled up to almost nothing since Cinema Nôvo first got looked into, ca. 1970. Directed by Carlos Diegues, one of the charter members of the movement, this old familiar tune about the contamination of Brazilian culture by American could seem fresh …
Feature-length sitcom: three divorced dads on their weekend with the kids. Canned wisecracks, cAnned wisdom, canned ruefulness. Some well-attuned performances, chiefly from sitcom vet Paul Reiser and, in a more marginal part, Janeane Garofalo as the Blind-Date-from-Hell. But the best thing in it (a telling cinematic comment) is the Mary-Chapin …
Mexican-made historical re-enactment of the adventures of a shipwrecked conquistador among American Indians in the 16th Century, his separation from his fellow Spaniards, his apprenticeship to a native medicine man, his independent career as an itinerant miracle worker. The account of any such conversion and assimilation is bound to be …
Takeoff on Captains Courageous, in which a full-grown upper-class twit (Chris Elliott) gets marooned on a fishing boat with a crew of rummy old salts. From there, it takes off into Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Mysterious Island territory: a nautical zone called Hell's Bucket, with its shark-man (Russ Tamblyn), …
Deprived of parenting as a lad, reared by television ("I learned the facts of life from watching The Facts of Life!"), he's now a lisping cable installer with a flypaper personality: he wants to be best friends with his new customer. Despite some side trips -- Court TV, "theme" restaurants, …
Well-chilled French thriller comparable in degrees centigrade to Time Out, With a Friend Like Harry, Merci pour le Chocolat, Red Lights, et al. An anonymous videocassette in a plastic bag is left without explanation at the doorstep of the civilized host of a book-chat TV show: a two-hour static surveillance …
Comedy out of the better-slob-than-snob school. But then, it hasn't much to be snobbish about. Its main boasting point is in finally giving Rodney Dangerfield a film role large enough to move around in: a nouveau-riche vulgarian who invades the inner sanctum of an exclusive country club. Bill Murray has …
Robin Williams slightly (and strangely) constrained as a car salesman and womanizer: we don't see much of his technique in either pursuit, though we get a definite whiff of squalidness. Midway through, a Dog Day Afternoon-type "hostage situation" puts an end to all that, and also to all interest. A …
The emergence of rock-and-roll, as seen from the catbird seat of Chess Records in Chicago: Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Etta James, et al. The golden music, the vintage cars, the period hairdos retain their glamour; the backstage clichés are just old. Adrien Brody, as producer Leonard …
First time in the Middle East for a contented American working wife, now facing Empty Nest Syndrome with two children flown, planning to meet up with her husband in Cairo to see the pyramids together. The husband, a United Nations emissary overseeing a refugee camp in Gaza, is detained incommunicado …
The situation in Northern Ireland is pointed up none too undramatically: a Catholic youth, reluctantly drawn into terrorist activities, develops a yen for the Catholic widow of a Protestant policeman he himself had a hand in murdering. The very tentatively unfolding romance is your basic regimen of lending a hand …