Chanel and Stravinsky. (The names arranged on screen in such a configuration as to give the impression the title might be Chanel Coco and Igor Stravinsky.) The Parisian fashionista, that is to say, who offered a haven to the expatriate Russian family-man composer, and eventually offered herself to him as …
Well-dressed tedium. Writer and director Anne Fontaine presumes your interest on the grounds that the dark-eyed orphaned heroine will go on to renown as Coco Chanel. With Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola, and Emmanuelle Devos.
Science fiction, but only by the technicality of containing several characters who are said to be aliens. They could as easily have been somebody's fairy godparents or genies from a bottle or the sort of lubricious Cupids who used to get things going in Thorne Smith's fantasy novels of the …
Cocoon: The Regurgitation. Cocoon: The Old Folks Acting Like Kids Again. Cocoon: The Transgalactic and Nontactile Romance. (Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!) Cocoon: The Endangered Alien Species. Cocoon: The Suspenseless Suspense. Cocoon: The Major Life-Altering Snap Decisions. (So what was life like on Antarea anyway?) The director, Daniel Petrie, …
Ungadgety specimen of science fiction, set in a not too distant future, with primary locations in the Far East and the Middle East, when a global Big Brother keeps a close and censorious eye on human coupling and breeding. While neither very original nor skillful as storytelling, the vision of …
A collection of eleven comic sketches filmed over a period of almost two decades by Jim Jarmusch, all of them involving, if not actually revolving around, coffee and cigarettes (or in one case, tea and cigarettes) and the various restaurant tables on which these are arrayed. Each takes place in …
Underworld comedy, veering between deadpan and stone cold dead, about a dweeby bookie who gets promoted to hitman and, under the caring tutelage of an old pro ("Remember. Guns don't kill people. We kill people"), discovers hidden natural talent. A crush on his lactose-intolerant yoga teacher steers the comedy down …
Difficult to put a finger on why this is so much more cold than comfort. The premise, from Stella Gibbons's "beloved" novel, seems promisingly amusing: Miss Flora Poste, just orphaned at age twenty-three, means to live off the charity of relatives until, thirty years or thereabouts hence, she gets around …
If Mike Figgis, following his string of digital-video experiments, wanted simply to prove he could still make a regular movie, then the present project might be termed a success. It could hardly be more "regular," an obvious and overwrought thriller about a New York family (Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone, and …
Well and deservingly known as cinematographer for such people as Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, News from Home) and Yvonne Rainer (Lives of Performers, Film about a Woman Who...), Babette Mangolte takes over the director's seat for this study of a young female painter trying to find her bearings in the …
Under pressure from his traditionalist grandfather, a Japanese junior executive revises his vacation plans (golfing in Hawaii) so as to perform the proper memorial ritual for his long-gone parents at the site of their accidental deaths: Iceland. (The image in the opening scenes in Japan is compressed to boxy TV …
What kind of movie — what genre of movie — is this, anyway? It starts out as a classical but lurid mystery thriller; then wanders off on a search for a shared border between horror/fantasy and honest-to-God religious art; then takes a final superhuman broad jump into the purview of …
The hardships and heartache of the American Civil War, cushioned in the plushness of the production: the crane-happy camera, the spendthrift special effects, the "painterly" washes of color and "dynamic" compositions, the visual poetry and bombast, the chiselled and sanded faces of the A-list romantic leads, Nicole Kidman (with her …
Off the same wall as Being John Malkovich. Paul Giamatti, being Paul Giamatti, is feeling the burden of his soul in the course of rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya, unable to locate the requisite lightness of touch. At the suggestion of his agent, the dyspeptic actor tries …
Director Michael Mann situates Tom Cruise under a silver-fox hair dye in the back seat of a taxi cab crowned by an ad for Bacardi Silver. That matching-color fashion statement says a lot about this sleek, cool, preening, glamorous thriller in the Mann-ly manner (Thief, Manhunter, Heat, not to forget …