Peter Bogdanovich's "comeback" -- meaning that the director of The Last Picture Show, etc., has come back from the TV-movie wasteland, if not necessarily that he has come back very far. A cramped and scrimping stage adaptation (written for the screen by the original playwright, Steven Peros), it chews over …
From charm school to Prince Charming, or at least Prince Moneybags: a career girl's fairy tale turned nightmare. (Tipoff to the Prince's dark side: the personal pinball machine in his rec room for working out stress. Earlier tipoff: he's portrayed by Robert Ryan.) Aside from the didactic value, this is …
Updated paraphrase of James M. Cain (never really outdated), to do with a handsome young drifter, a fishmonger with a bad heart, and the latter's unsatisfied wife. Between the first-person voice-over ("It's amazing the way you get into things"), the lonely muted trumpet during the credits, and the Young Brando …
Explorers of an underground river in Transylvania -- "the Amazon of underground rivers" -- find more than they bargained for: computer-cartoon parasitic flying amphibians. In the dark and under the water, the action is all but unfollowable, and outside of Piper Perabo's desperate last moments on a sheer rock face, …
An orthodox trashy murder mystery boasting, however, a most unorthodox detective: a ranting, psychotic street person (Samuel L. Jackson) with a headful of dreadlocks and a well-stocked hideaway inside a rock formation in a public park. (Everyone on the street knows the Caveman by name and address, but no one …
Mongolian movie from one of the two directors of The Story of the Weeping Camel, Byambasuren Davaa. This one tells the story of a little girl and a stray dog, not a yellow dog, but white with a black face and a black spot on his back, hence his christening …
Microbudget suspense film of a Filipino-American brought back to his homeland for his father's funeral and dragged through hell to retrieve his kidnapped mother and sister from Islamic terrorists. The thrift affords small comfort to the paying spectator who has to peer through the haze of the video image and …
The sloganeering title figure ("I'm a prophet against profit!" "Celibate for celluloid!" etc.) abducts at gunpoint a bratty Hollywood superstar called Honey Whitlock. And in short order, he ungently "persuades" her to join his band of underground-cinema guerrillas -- The Sprocket Holes -- on a hit-and-run production titled Raving Beauty, …
Ghastly-looking Danish film (or video blown up into film), flattened, faded, blurred, jostled, jumbled. It's difficult, through all the optical distractions, to take a lot of interest in the foofaraw at a family gathering in the country. Directed by Thomas Vinterberg.
Negligible Woody Allen effort. The fact that Allen the actor is nowhere in the cast is no doubt part of the problem, but chiefly because his substitute, Kenneth Branagh, is a problem unto himself. (The Purple Rose of Cairo managed to become one of Allen's best films without his on-screen …
Marcel Proust, just the way you always pictured him: the milky eyes, the dark bags beneath them, the coughing and wheezing, the twenty-four-hour-a-day pajamas and robe -- all the sundry signs of a sensitivity so great that it compels him, for example, to insulate his room with cork. What the …
Director Fina Torres injects a pop sensibility (brightness, coolness, breeziness) into a traditional Cinderella story about an aspiring classical singer -- a Venezuelan mezzo in flight from the altar to the garrets of Paris. Loopy dialogue ("A Brazilian who does yoga is like a Russian bullfighter"). Adoring photography of the …
To deal with Jacques Rivette, it eventually becomes necessary to come to grips with the issue of length. At three and a quarter hours, this entrancing fantasy is far from his longest effort. In his own defense, Rivette will cite a "tradition" of length in movies -- Griffith, Gance. (He …
S-f sickie to do with a serial killer who drowns women on camcorder, bathes the bodies in bleach for a doll-like finish, and masturbates over them while suspended from fourteen steel rings piercing his dorsal flesh. What makes it science-fictional and not just high-tech is the red-licorice body stocking that …