Ang Lee's adaptation of a 1994 novel by Rick Moody, set in John Cheever country at Thanksgiving, with the ice outdoors outweighing even that in the cocktail glasses. The view of the people -- alienation as a spectator sport -- is no less aloof than in the filmmaker's Jane Austen …
Dumped the body of the hit-and-run victim into the Atlantic, that's what. You and your school chums. The big mystery is, Who am "I"? But the movie in the end (and long before the end) is less interested in a mystery than in a homicidal Ancient Mariner terrorizing teenagers with …
Gender-bender comedy inspired by Tom Hanks's thanks to his gay high-school teacher during his Oscar acceptance speech for Philadelphia. What if a teacher "outed" on the Oscarcast were scheduled to be married at the end of the week? The movie has steady fun with sexual stereotypes, Hollywood types, TV types, …
Downtrodden Austrian peasants are left the farm when their malevolent lord and master is murdered. The simple life ends; a complicated one begins. Rustic dullness carries over. Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
Old-fashioned wartime romance, a bit faded, a bit wilted, but after all it's an old war -- the Great War -- and the romance is the historical one of Ernie "Kid" Hemingway and his Red Cross nurse in Italy. (The leg wound, the near amputation, and the broken heart would …
Cold, abstract, almost hypothetical proposition concerning a couple of mid-level corporate pricks -- a stiff one and a limp one -- who, on an out-of-town assignment, form a pact to avenge themselves on the opposite sex (i.e., "restore a little dignity to our lives"; i.e., "payback"). To that end, the …
Pale imitation of a 1950s soap opera, set in that actual era. The issues are solid (first love, the wrong side of the tracks, the gossip-stained reputation), and the storytelling shows good patience, and the cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, Joanna Going, Billy Crudup, Kathy Baker, Will Patton) …
Astonishingly billed as the highest-grossing Irish independent film in history. Astonishingly, anyway, until you try to remember what you would have thought was the highest. It puts together a couple of fresh faces, the lumpily irregular one of newcomer Peter McDonald and the saggingly lived-in one of Brendan Gleeson, and …
Notwithstanding the dropping of three words of the title, the re-do of The Day of the Jackal has not approached its task with a mind to downsizing. Over and above the obligatory bigger gun and bigger action sequences, the principal accretion is in the recruitment of an incarcerated IRA "freedom …
At first, and for the better part of its two and a half hours, this is apt to seem an oddly unadventurous undertaking for Quentin Tarantino, a gabby adaptation of a novel by his revered Elmore Leonard (source of notoriously mediocre movies), draggy, only fitfully funny, lifelessly staged, largely static. …
Scruffy little bleached-out comic thriller from Norway, with the attention-holding situation of a dishonest Oslo postman nosing into the private affairs of an attractive blonde on his route and finding himself up to his ears in criminal activity: not only his own. Robert Skaerstad, Andrine Saether; directed by Pal Sletaune.
The title, like Boccaccio 70, like Casanova 70, like De Sade, like Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), is simply to set up an expectation of hot stuff. What actually awaits is a rosily photographed costume romance, set unconvincingly in the 16th Century, …
New York-style comic misadventures of a would-be writer ("I'm on a spiritual quest, a voyage of self-discovery") who bungles a drug delivery for his scamming Uncle Sammy. His best buddy, meanwhile, is a beer distributor in a price war and a running gun battle with his competitors. And the current …