Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has–like…
At the University of Texas at Austin, this was the first offering screened in introductory film classes; if the professor, a man whose knowledge of cinema history was surpassed only by his willingness to share it with everybody all the time anyplace without any prompting whatsoever, didn’t consider it the…
Small-town stud Tully (Anson Mount) works the family farm with his younger brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) and their inexpressive, unsmiling widower dad (Bob Burrus). The sudden possibility that they might lose the farm opens up a trove of disturbing family secrets, challenging Tully’s heretofore shallow nature. Hilary Birmingham–who co-produced (with…
Taking its cue from Christopher Hitchens’ excoriating, similarly titled book (minus the “s” in “Trials”), this terse and compelling documentary presents the case that former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger deserves to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, under the standards applied to…
Through a strange chain of events, a likable young pianist (Anna Mouglalis) becomes an interloper in the household of an internationally renowned musician (Jacques Dutronc), whom she believes might be her father. He’s sure he’s not, but her appearance proves disturbing to both his son (Rodolphe Pauly) and even more…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
Ah, Halle’s berries. Don’t care much for them personally, as they’re components of an actress (bane of the thinking man), but those golden globes are shifting loads of Hollywood product these days, the latest dose being Die Another Day, the 20th official entry in the 40-year-old James Bond franchise. As…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself–and that the terrible furies…
When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around last fall, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, thought its subject matter felt a bit off post-September…
The advantage to making a Christmas movie is that, no matter how mediocre your final product is, it’s all but guaranteed to show up on at least one TV station, at least once a year, in perpetuity; even such woeful losers as the Nicolas Cage-Dana Carvey comedy Trapped in Paradise,…
Rarely does a theme unify a film festival; such gatherings, for the most part, are glued together only by movies few have seen and movies few will ever see, the unwanted or misunderstood offspring of would-be artists and could-be visionaries, kooky veterans who long ago ditched the mainstream for the…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy-rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for Potter…
Writer-director Todd Haynes’ loving re-creation of a 1950s-style Hollywood melodrama (think Douglas Sirk) is a puzzling affair. Watching Far from Heaven is like taking a trip back in time–not to the real world of 1957 but, rather, to the reel 50s, as personified by such classic “women’s films” as All…
If the title is a Jeopardy question, then the answer might be “How does Steven Seagal come across these days?” or maybe “How will you feel after an 88-minute rip-off of The Rock with action confined to slo-mo gun firing and random glass-shattering?” Seagal, who’s slowly morphing into an untalented…
A tough Paris cop (Jean Reno) flies to Tokyo for the funeral of his great lost love, only to find out that she has left him in charge of the rebellious teen-age daughter (Ryoko Hirosue) whose existence she had kept a secret from him. When the girl turns out to…
It is the essential sexiness of holy archetypes that stirs up a ruckus in Carlos Carrera’s competent if unremarkable tragedy, adapted by screenwriter Vicente Lenero from the 1875 book by Portuguese author Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz. We first meet our young, present-day hero (and anti-hero) Padre Amaro (Mexican superstar…
So enchanting it takes your breath away, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 live-action version of the famous fairy tale remains one of the most magical films ever made. Boasting a new print, struck from the restored French negative, and an improved, albeit not perfect, soundtrack, this glorious black-and-white film–in French with English…
Three years on, the besieged phenomenon–the scourge, Antichrist or the Vanilla Ice of the ’90s, pick ’em–has been rendered beloved; when they, slick bizzers in suits and on cell phones, speak of “Eminem” and “gross” in the same sentence, they’re talking only receipts, merchandise, profit. The man, just touching 30,…
The repellent Casanova portrayed by Campbell Scott in Roger Dodger has an instinct for looking up skirts and down blouses, but no capacity for looking in the mirror. Part salesman, part caveman, Madison Avenue copywriter Roger Swanson is, deep in his cynical heart, as loathsome to himself as he is…
The question “All right?” is asked of every character, on many occasions, throughout Mike Leigh’s latest film, All or Nothing. In working-class London, it seems, it’s the preferred substitute for “Hello” or “What’s up?” Whether or not it elicits a response is almost irrelevant; the question itself is a formality…
Director Chris Eyre, whose engaging 1997 road movie, Smoke Signals, helped energize a modest new wave of Native American filmmaking, is bound to open even more eyes with his bold second feature, Skins. Filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska, it’s a vivid look at two…
With Frida–the story of profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo–it’s evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it’ll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it), but that’s the first and last cynical comment of this review. Frida is…
