The title character is the custodian of "a rare art indeed," an open-air magic act in which painted paper masks appear and disappear on the magician's face as quick as a blink. The secret, according to Chinese custom, can only be passed to a male heir, and with his biological …
A little sickie (cough-cough) from Canada, about a funeral-parlor apprentice (the pale, pensive, Pre-Raphaelite Molly Parker) who cozies up, after hours, with the steady supply of handsome young well-conditioned male cadavers. It confirms our suspicions that necrophilia is a subject better approached obliquely, furtively, figuratively: Sleeping Beauty, Laura, Portrait of …
Bronx pizza cook, aspiring actor, and committed homophobe mistranslates "GWM" in the Roommates classifieds as "Guy with Money," and complications and stereotypes ensue. Consciousness-raising at the sitcom level. With Nick Scotti, Anthony Barrile, Anthony DeSando, Molly Price, and Christopher Lawford; directed by Tony Vitale.
Chronicle of the crime spree of a couple of lamming lovers (Frances O'Connor and Matt Day, in roles very unlike theirs in Love and Other Catastrophes, and very unconvincing in them) up to their necks in more serious matters -- pedophilia, blackmail, murder -- than their normal drink-spiking and rolling …
Slimy suspense film about the hunt for a homicidal sex fiend with a harem of shanghaied women in a Durham dungeon. It wants only to make your skin crawl. It wants it so badly, so pantingly, so droolingly, that it makes your skin crawl for that reason alone. With Morgan …
Sword-and-sorcery adventure, done up literally brown: muddy, dirty, dull color, enclosing sloppy action scenes and pushy closeups. Based on a character by the 1930s pulp writer, Robert E. Howard. With Kevin Sorbo (TV's Hercules), Tia Carrere, Thomas Ian Griffith, Karina Lombard, Harvey Fierstein; directed by John Nicolella.
A further waste of Martin Scorsese's time and ours. This stuffy "prestige picture" on the life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama up through his flight from Tibet with the Red Chinese nipping at his heels (and through four different actors in the central role: an unnatural acceleration of the reincarnation …
Curtis Hanson's ill-advised adaptation of James Ellroy's monumental junkpile of a novel. He has, in the adaptation process, cleaned up a lot of the trash (the entire pseudonymous smear of Walt Disney), but what's left is still trash, and thinned out as it is, less coherent. The exposition is often …
Director Christian Vincent grants us the agreeable sight of two mainstays of the contemporary French cinema -- Daniel Auteuil, Isabelle Huppert -- maneuvering their way expertly through an intimate and articulate little drama of a relationship on the rocks. Very, very little. The whole of it is completely believable and …
A viable idea: an inveterate prevaricator is compelled, because his moptop son wishes it on five birthday candles, to tell the truth for twenty-four hours. But the performance of Jim (One-Gear) Carrey is so muscle-strainingly, vein-bulgingly exaggerated it's as if he's explaining the idea to kindergartners. Which in a way …
Arthur Dong, victim himself in an incident of gay-bashing, gathers up documentary evidence on several murders of homosexuals: gruesome crime-scene photos; police-interrogation video; interviews with the killers in prison. The picture that emerges is far from clear (it might be surprising, or might not, how many of the killers have …
Two movies in one. The mostly charming and inventive first half traces an unhurried courtship by funnyman Roberto Benigni (also the director) of his regular co-star and real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi. In the second half, picking up the characters' lives several years after the birth of their son, Benigni tries …
A smarty-pants comedy that outsmarts itself. It tells of your basic disgruntled ex-employee who storms the boss's office with a gun (ha-ha) to demand his job back, but who comes away instead with the boss's daughter as a hostage and without actually killing anyone. The bigger joke (ha-ha-ha) is, or …
Almodóvar, heavily armed with his standard pots of garish color, but otherwise rather toned down. The tone, in fact, is quite uncertain: not quite light, not quite serious either, a bit salacious, a bit melodramatizing, totally uncommanding. The filmmaker takes little from the original Ruth Rendell novel: the wheelchair and …
The excitement of David Lynch's return to the big screen, ending an absence of five years, starts to taper off steadily after the breathless credits sequence of automobile headlights gobbling up an infinite dotted yellow line underneath the retro pulp-paperback lettering. It -- the excitement, such as it is -- …