A regretful gay romance between a shady middle-aged Beijing businessman and his college-age paid consort. At the end, there may well be a feeling of "So what?" And yet, in retort to that, there's something refreshing, even liberating, about the mere existence of a gay film without politics -- without …
The daughter of Sir Richard Croft inherits a sacred mission from her late father, who seems to have known when she was eight years old that she would grow up to be a militant extremist of Girl Power, and known too that she would discover the hidden clock and his …
Robert Redford returns to Brubaker mode as a prison reformer, only this time it's a military prison and he himself is a prisoner, a much-decorated general, former Vietnam POW, author of the biblical Burden of Command, and a man of such loyalty and integrity that he opted not to fight …
Hectic sex comedy, almost Restoration-like in its worldly-wise cynicism and indulgence, revolving around five Italian best buddies on the brink of thirty. One of them, the pivotal one, is an unmarried father-to-be with a wandering eye for an eighteen-year-old blonde, a sort of Florentine "Marcia Brady." One is a recent …
An elegy on an entire generation -- the one that came of age during the Second World War -- but narrowly focussed on four East London drinking buddies, and most particularly on the two whose friendship dates to the North African theater of the war. The title, from the Booker …
Cold-eyed, mirthless Israeli comedy centered around a conventional family of Georgian émigrés in Tel Aviv and their impatient attempts to marry off a thirty-one-year-old son. Little problem: he's secretly playing house with an older divorcée. And doing so with extreme biological bluntness. First-time filmmaker Dover Kosashvili is Georgian himself, and …
Three men in provincial England struggle with their lives after the death of a fourth. We go over the same chronological ground three times, from three different points of view -- those of the deceased's homosexual lover, the deceased's brother-in-law, and a long-lost friend returned from his wanderings -- and …
A wish-fulfillment fairy tale, more voguishly known as an empowerment myth, concerning a So-Cal sorority sister, Fashion Merchandising major, and Miss Hawaiian Tropic runner-up (Reese Witherspoon, in her mile-wide vein of mockery) who gets herself admitted into Harvard Law School to chase after her ex-boyfriend -- and oh by the …
An anecdotal ragbag detailing the life of a "skint" Catholic family in Depression-era Liverpool, principally from the point of view of the stuttering seven-year-old title figure (Anthony Borrows, a fresh face, almost featurelessly smooth in repose, expressively dented in action). The fear-mongering Catholicism is laid on a bit thick, even …
Rancid little "indie" begins in Larry Clark territory (teen larceny, incest, voyeurism, profanity -- what, no drugs?), adds the ingredient of middle-age pedophilia ("I'm the best cocksucker in the whole Western Hemisphere"), but then tapers off into mere tedium. The title is an abbreviation of the Long Island Expressway as …
Dying man's last wish: to build his dream house and at the same time bond with his nihilistic, incommunicative, pierced and glue-sniffing son. A feel-gooey movie, deftly photographed (by Vilmos Zsigmond) but brutally, maulingly manipulative. With Kevin Kline, Hayden Christensen, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jena Malone, and Mary Steenburgen; directed by …
Dr. Tolkien's home-cooked myth. First course only. All manner of visual invention, photographic trickery, computer magic, etc., cannot alter what is in essence an overblown bedtime story. They can only blow it up bigger. And the burden of it is more or less tripled by the knowledge that these three …
Dr. Tolkien's home-cooked myth. First course only. All manner of visual invention, photographic trickery, computer magic, etc., cannot alter what is in essence an overblown bedtime story. They can only blow it up bigger. And the burden of it is more or less tripled by the knowledge that these three …
A contemporary but apparently timeless tale of star-crossed lesbians at a posh boarding school. It adopts the point of view, or anyway adopts the first-person narration, of a mousy newcomer called Mouse ("I felt like a gray mouse heading right for the mouth of a cat"), who learns about life, …
A well-informed, soft-hearted send-up (as opposed to a peremptory putdown) of the grade-Z science fiction of the Fifties, wherein an altruistic scientist, a megalomaniacal scientist, a pair of stranded space aliens, and a dormant mind-controlling skeleton squabble over a radioactive element called Atmospherium. Its blatant shortcomings -- the uncharismatic cast, …