Reekingly urbane Mike Nichols chamber piece, prone to be seen as a long-distance companion to his Carnal Knowledge in its dirty talk and its romantic disillusion. The quartet of players -- two American females, a stripper (but of course) and a portrait photographer, and two British males, an obituarist and …
Avariciously commercial French comedy of the type that tends to be remade in Hollywood. Francis Veber, its writer and director, amounts practically to a one-man factory of the type. And it's hard to see what could stand in the way of a remake of this one, a PC farce about …
The freedom-of-expression debate thrashed out in the abstract: a stage-set of stylized antiquity, a nameless country, and only two (nameless) characters, an inquisitor and an author of children's books. All impulse to giggle at the pretension is soon crushed by the shared torture of it all. Madeleine Stowe, Alan Rickman; …
Foreign film in the ever-popular peasant genre, with the ever-popular weaknesses of sentimentalizing and ennobling the subject. This time the peasants are a family of Inner Mongolians in a French-Russian co-production originally titled Urga (as in "Did you tie that red flag on my urga?"). Apart from the urga itself …
Abbas Kiarostami, always gravitating toward the province of documentary, here goes further than usual, though perhaps not all the way to the very last toe. The film chronicles true events, the arrest and trial of an imposter who had insinuated himself into a middle-class home in the guise of Kiarostami's …
Vindication for the grainy, jiggly image of the handheld camcorder, the mockumentarist’s best friend and a corner-cutting, cost-cutting device for any purpose. The premise — the excuse — is the making of a video souvenir at the going-away party for a Manhattan yuppie, the night before his departure to a …
An enchanting start -- a child rises from bed to watch the hoisting of a circus tent below his window in the dawn light. The delicate mood there is soon flattened under an avalanche of Fellini-isms -- parades, painted faces, slapstick, bathos, oily color, and the director's uncurbed exhibitionism.
Amy Heckerling returns, more or less, to the scene of her Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). It's now Beverly Hills High, but it's still contemporary So-Cal youth — that's the important thing. And there are important social changes to document: "God, skateboards! That's like so five years ago!" The …
Teacherly sports film, the athletic equivalent of Stand and Deliver and Lean on Me (with Samuel L. Jackson every bit the equal of Edward James Olmos and Morgan Freeman), a salute to a real-life taskmaster by the name of Ken Carter, who demanded that his high-school basketballers sign contracts agreeing …
The main contribution traceable directly from Loretta Lynn to the movie on her life -- besides, of course, her having lived it and then recounted it in that bastard literary form, the as-told-to autobiography -- is simply her felt presence looking over the collective shoulder of the moviemakers. This queenly …
Warts-and-nothing-but portrait by Ron (Bull Durham) Shelton of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, brawler, wife-beater, gun-wielder, whorer, boozer, pill popper, reckless driver, cusser, racist, anti-Semite -- oh, and once upon a time baseball player. It concentrates on the seventy-second and last year of his life, witnessed close up by his handpicked biographer-cum-chauffeur-cum-nurse, …
Sylvester Stallone portrays a member of the L.A.P.D. Zombie Squad -- whatever that is -- named Cobretti, hence Cobra. (His given name is disclosed, with some boyish abashment, to be Marion -- just like John Wayne's real one, although somehow less likely to have been bestowed by Italian parents than …
Everyone outside of Eric Roberts (his hair dyed a mustardy yellow) appears to be acting at half-speed. This histrionic cyclone represents a flag-waving, quasi-evangelistic troubleshooter for Coca-Cola, Inc., sent from the Atlanta home office to Australia, to find some unknown trouble in order that it might be fixed. ("Do not …
What Tom Cruise did for military recruitment in Top Gun, he tries to do again for bartending school. Enroll now, for a unique opportunity to travel, to meet people (young women, rich women), and to learn the arts of synchronized drink-mixing, bottle-juggling, and dimple-flashing. Philosophy is no longer a curriculum …