Where Joseph Wambaugh, the policemen's friend and mouthpiece, wants faithfully to represent his former partners on the force, Robert Aldrich wants to employ those same characters metaphorically to represent something bigger. Which is, the average slob. He uses the policemen's daily debasement in the L.A. nightworld to strip them of …
Black comedy, a bit too openly pleased with itself, a bit too hell-bent on quirkiness, revolving around a confessed sex addict and his demented mother, played (respectively) by Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston. The broadest smiles, the nearest things to audible laughs, are apt to be elicited by the tourist-trap …
Alan Rudolph's self-designated "serious comedy," about seekers of love in Los Angeles, is indeed a comedy in the rudimentary sense that it has a nontragic ending, and is serious in the sense that it is unfunny. The deliberate stylization of the thing, though it may cut off comments about such …
Bruce Weber's private rumination, backed by his own voice-over, on his career as a photographer, on other photographers, and on assorted interests and enthusiasms: male model Peter Johnson, cabaret singer Frances Faye, the Rat Pack, Robert Mitchum, Brazilian jujitsu champion Rickson Gracie, British explorer Wilfred Thesiger, dogs, etc. Disorderly, desultory, …
Sweet and sentimental French film, a remake of a 1945 one, about the new supervisor — nicknamed Old Baldy — at a school for "difficult" boys, whipping his class into shape as a tight-knit choral group, for one fleeting term in 1949. One of the boys grows up to be …
An old-style musical fantasy wherein people's innermost emotions blossom into song and dance, even though the plot format of a Broadway audition affords no reason why it shouldn't remain a "realistic" backstage musical. Too bad, therefore, that the songs and dances -- especially the songs -- are not very good. …
Felicitous comic conceit: a community-theater production of The Beggar's Opera as a microcosm of small-town tawdriness. It affords Anthony Hopkins a role in which he can really let loose without unbalancing the ensemble: a moonlighting director (a solicitor by day) who thinks he can be a caustic, eccentric genius with …
And also The Gifted: two brilliant, charming, multi-talented sons of eminent Jewish leaders on opposite sides of orthodoxy, and especially on opposite sides of the Zionist issue at the end of World War II, one of them a Hasidic rabbi and the other a liberal scholar and journalist. The father …
The Angeleno portrait artist Don Bachardy reminisces in frugal video on his three and a half decades of intimacy with British author Christopher Isherwood, thirty years his senior. (The one clip of Isherwood with sound demonstrates dramatically how closely the American protégé patterned his speech after his mentor.) In essence, …
Haunted-car thriller, from a novel by Stephen King. It's love at first sight when a klutzy high-school kid lays eyes on a 1958 Plymouth Fury, with a history of violent deaths behind it. The feeling is reciprocated: the hero's enemies become the car's enemies, and his friends become its rivals. …
Haunted-car thriller, from a novel by Stephen King. It's love at first sight when a klutzy high-school kid lays eyes on a 1958 Plymouth Fury, with a history of violent deaths behind it. The feeling is reciprocated: the hero's enemies become the car's enemies, and his friends become its rivals. …
Disney's re-do is probably better the fewer times you've read, seen, or heard the story. With or without 3-D, this is nevertheless a lavishly, lovingly, and imaginatively illustrated edition of the Dickens holiday classic, in a graphic style congenial to a Victorian ghost story, and in a motion-capture computer-animation technique …
Preston Sturges's post-Depression Depression comedy. An office toiler at the low end of the wage scale, but with hope everpresent in his heart, enters a coffee company's slogan contest (his slogan: "If you can't sleep, it isn't the coffee; it's the bunk'), is hoaxed by his fellow workers into believing …
Family reunion and reconciliation: the black sheep returns from banishment in time for his mother’s battle with cancer. The setting-up of who’s who is clumsy, and the occasional direct address to the camera is lazy, and two and a half hours are more than enough. But the unified French ensemble …
Holiday comedy, adapted from an anomalous novel by John Grisham (The Firm, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The this, The that), about a suburban couple who opt, after their only offspring has flown the coop into the Peace Corps, to buck the Christmas tradition and resist the social pressures …