Hostage thriller, with a breathless pace and an oxygen-deprived plot, from a story idea by Larry Cohen: a companion piece to Phone Booth, but freed, through the technology of mobile phones, for a lot of car chases and running around. Kim Basinger throws herself, body and soul, into the role …
Following the lead of the Vito Russo book of the same name, documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman propose to trace the whole history of the depiction of homosexuality in American movie houses. The outcome is highly entertaining in the usual way of compilation films in the vein of That's …
Maladroit basketball fantasy that speaks to the current miseries of the Boston fan: the Celts are back in the NBA finals, in the old Garden, and two local zealots kidnap the opposing team's surly star (the shaven-headed as well as shaven-armpitted Damon Wayans) before Game Seven. The actual effect is …
A situation reminiscent of Jack Clayton's Our Mother's House (1967): a family of sudden orphans buries their Mum on the premises and keeps her death a secret. Writer-director Andrew Birkin, working from a novel by Ian McEwan, takes an hour to get to where Clayton got in a few minutes; …
Fine in principle: three goyim (Ellen Burstyn, Diane Ladd, Olympia Dukakis) ought to be able to portray Jewish widows, and a black director (Bill Duke) and past specialist in action films (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover) ought to be able to direct them. All it should take is imagination. …
Italian zombie film (practically like saying Italian lasagna). For some unknown reason, the dead are rising a week after being laid to rest, and the impassive graveyard watchman must split open their skulls, one way or another, to lay them back down. Fine all-around production -- sets, lighting, color -- …
Italian zombie film (practically like saying Italian lasagna). For some unknown reason, the dead are rising a week after being laid to rest, and the impassive graveyard watchman must split open their skulls, one way or another, to lay them back down. Fine all-around production -- sets, lighting, color -- …
A prune-faced piece of erotica to do with a dweebish dot-commer (Peter Sarsgaard) who persuades a skinny stripper (Molly Parker) to accompany him to Vegas for a wild weekend on her terms: separate rooms, no kissing on the mouth, no penetration, four hours per night, ten G's on the barrelhead. …
Warmly photographed, slushy road movie revolving around a motherless urchin who gets under the skin, onto the conscience, and into the heart of a dishonest stranger, together setting out in search of the boy's unknown father. The Brazilian locales add some grit. But not enough. With Fernanda Montenegro and Vinicius …
Wall-of-the-Roman-Empire epic, set in the early 2nd Century A.D., the wall being the figurative one the Romans ran into among the Picts in Northern Britain and the literal one Hadrian built further to the south, the outer boundary. In essence Cavalry-and-Indians in skirts and breastplates, the narrative centers on seven …
Three-cornered love affair in placid pastels. The complicated situation unfolds along an unpredictable path that never, in its lengthy meanderings, comes anywhere near deep psychology or timely themes or trendy film techniques. While the whole thing seems to be a sort of anachronism, it develops a sort of stubborn lifelikeness …
Another franchise in the French coming-of-age industry. Semi-autobiographical, bien sûr, nosing around the same territory that Diane Kurys scoured earlier in Peppermint Soda and Entre Nous. An eight-year-old girl bursts through a closed door and smack into a deadly silence in a tiff between mère and père: everyone freezes, and …
Rolando Klein, a Chilean moviemaker routed through the UCLA film department, fabricates a Mayan myth about a mountain-top mystic who is enlisted by drought-plagued Indians to make an appeal to the rain god, Chac. The plot exposition is done ponderously day-by-day and step-by-step. All along, the National Geographic images capture …
Is not life in women's prison much like life all over these United States? Corruption in high places, capitalistic back-stabbing and throat-cutting, racial strife, mob riots, drugs, pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, lesbian rape, heterosexual rape, sadism, murder and mayhem, an obscenity every couple of words (or a couple of obscenities …
AIDS-era La Ronde. The round robin of sex partners proposes a number of alternatives to old-fashioned copulation: fully clothed sex, unconsummated sex, no-contact sex. All in all it creates a climate of tolerance, somewhat at war with the climate of tedium. The grayish dull color sets the tone, and the …