Sisterhood in the repressive society of Beirut: an Other Woman, a defiled fiancée, a closet lesbian, an aging actress, a lonesome seamstress, a demented bag lady, all in orbit around a second-class beauty shop called Si Bella (the “B” hanging upside down on the façade, the electricity prone to outages). …
Hector Babenco takes us behind prison walls in Brazil (different prison walls than in his Kiss of the Spider Woman), in well-lit photography, for an episodic two and a half hours, where an affable doctor battles AIDS, educates the inmates, distributes condoms, etc., but mostly lends a sympathetic ear. Flashbacks, …
From Mike Leigh, another polished, flinty, brilliant fragment in the monumental mosaic of the Human Comedy. The fundamental and solid idea of the thing is to compare and contrast (back and forth, with no set plan) the personalities of two love-hungry girlfriends at two separate stages of their lives: their …
The town liar and the town tease (representing the two halves of writer John Hughes's artistic temperament) spend the night locked inside a Target discount store: they "open up" to one another, roller-skate through the aisles, confront burglars. The setting gives Hughes something besides his audience to feel superior to. …
Two sisters, one poor, one rich, fight for custody of their dead sister's son. The lush and rather decorative visual style, with a lot of foreground activity from flowers, leaves, smoke, garden trellises, stone balusters, and so forth, and a lot of shallow focus to mash either foreground or background …
From Brian De Palma, the same old thing. Excepting Sean Penn. Or anyhow Sean Penn's hairdo: a thinning-on-top Art Garfunkel-y blond frizz, for the role of a crooked, coked-up lawyer. The leading chameleon of the American screen can be counted on always to show you a new look. Otherwise, it's …
A young woman named Carmen is cast for the lead role in a dance production of the same name, and proceeds to prove her rightness for the role off stage as well as on. That old life-imitating-art gambit, or more accurately, that old art-imitating-life-imitating-art gambit, which has been a creaky …
A series of set pieces dedicated to proving the unworkability of sexual relationships. So premeditated and predictable are the moves of actors and camera that the supposed human fickleness comes across more as a kind of conspiracy. The script is by Jules Feiffer, which is not hard to tell, and …
Satisfactory neither as documentary, which was the least that could have been expected of director Robert Kaylor (Derby), nor as a melodrama of the midway. What potential there was to delineate the mystique and the ambience and the inner workings of carnival life is pretty thoroughly siphoned off, soaked up, …
Diary film, divided into three "chapters." In the first, the director, writer, and star Nanni Moretti putters around on his Vespa (lengthy tracking shots from behind him), looking at buildings (lateral tracking shots), dropping in on movies, seeking out the murder site of Pasolini. In the next, he visits a …
Ferenc Molnar's fantasy, Liliom, has been Americanized (a lot of corn, plus Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae), Hammersteined ("When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high..."), and Hollywoodized (lighter-than-air color, broader-than-barn screen), and it endures rather well ("Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain..."). …
The main ingredients -- the adolescent heroine's mystical, mind-over-matter powers, her mother's sadistic, religious zeal, and her classmates' brutal bullying -- never interlock with each other. The crazy mother especially, with her Salvation Army frock and her Pre-Raphaelite hairdo, seems to be several decades out of sync with these modern …
From a Jim Harrison novel (with plenty of hunting rifles and a phantasmic wolf to prove it), a slice of American Gothic carved out of a farming community in upstate Michigan where the two middle-aged teachers in the two-room schoolhouse -- Dennis Hopper, adopting Dennis Weaver's limp from Gunsmoke, and …
More literary stargazing by writer and first-time director Christopher Hampton, much preferable to the almost concurrent Total Eclipse, on which he was writer only. No doubt it helps that he's back on his native soil, turning his gaze to the homosexual Bloomsbury belletrist, Lytton Strachey. His ear for high-toned Wildean …