Soap opera with a Jamaican patois — that of the black housekeeper in a fractured, then broken, Baltimore home. The housekeeper herself, notwithstanding a deep dark secret, is too good to be true: supremely self-possessed, wryly patronizing, witty, wise, and Whoopi Goldberg. But the Only Child of the household (since …
An "experienced" woman tries to settle down to conjugal contentment with a Monterey fisherman, but is cruelly tempted toward a new, extramarital experience. Sordid domestic drama, with a whole-souled belief in man's capacity to sink to the level of beasts (and below), from a couple of long-time castigators of the …
Any remake would have been hard put to be worse than the laughable original of 1981, and the latest CGI technology, with or without the augmentative 3-D (added as an afterthought in the laboratory), oughtn’t to have had too impossible a job of improving upon the herky-jerky stop-motion monsters of …
Free adaptation of François Bégaudeau’s nonfiction chronicle of a single year of teaching French, or trying to teach it, to a group of restive fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds at a melting-pot public school in a rough district of Paris. Bégaudeau essentially — and needless to say, convincingly — plays himself on …
Early and incontestably minor work by Claude Sautet, a good, solid, serious, straightforward, fatalistic crime thriller that gives little hint of the glories of his peak period in the Seventies. All the same, it can lay claim to some fine qualities: a fast-start robbery in broad daylight, open air, and …
Abysmal exploitation film begins somewhere in the area of The Blackboard Jungle (but a bit deeper into the jungle: every square inch of Abraham Lincoln High has been spray-painted with graffiti, and metal-detectors have been installed at the entrances to ensure that the students leave their guns and switchblades at …
Mark Lester's revised forecast of the educational future, an escalation of his Class of 1984, with a Free Fire Zone around the school, and robot teachers inside (programmed to deal harshly with disciplinary problems). The "relevance" of this vision fades in a hurry once the teachers emerge as the chief …
A cuckold, too chicken to take revenge first-hand, kills himself in such a manner as to frame the lover for murder. (The ungrieving widow is no help: "Leave me out of this.") Black-ish, noir-ish crime comedy calls to mind the Coen brothers, or their Fargo at any rate, if only …
Set in Canada, Paris, London, San Francisco, and spoken in English, French, and Cantonese, this Olivier Assayas film contemplates the possibility of change in a person, and gives full, serious, unsentimental attention to the difficulty and uncertainty of such change. The person in question is "a junkie to the bone," …
Part public-service message and part private love-triangle. It covers twenty-one days at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and nine days of after-care; but despite the roughly proportionate allotment of screen time, it feels nearer to nine days inside and twenty-one days out. Or better, it feels near enough to …
Terribly tedious amnesia comedy about a P.I. and murder witness (Dana Carvey, lightweight as lint) who starts each day with no memory of anything that came before: Korsakov's Syndrome, it's called. (Kind of an inversion of Groundhog Day, where the hero alone remembers the past. ) The premise seems to …
Slow-to-start and long-to-end espionage thriller (or the further adventures of Dr. Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's CIA guy from Patriot Games), detailing a covert and illicit military action against the Colombian drug cartels. There's a well-staged ambush at around the hour mark (sole survivor: Harrison Ford), and an exciting rescue near …
Constrained kidnap thriller told in parallel action but out-of-step chronology, crosscutting between the teased-out details of an Ohio businessman's abduction ("The man Hertz and Avis are afraid of"), over the course of the first day, and the impact on his family over the numberless days that follow. The why of …
Two of them, a conscientious convenience-store one and a goof-off video-store one: best buddies, and close cousins of the populace of Slacker. Spanning one day in the lives, the micro-budgeted movie is, perhaps appropriately, scruffy in appearance (coarse-grained, high-contrast black-and-white) and scabrous in manner. Driblets and droplets of humor slip …