In turn-of-the-century France, a minister (Charles Berling) scandalizes his tiny Protestant community by divorcing his wife (Isabelle Huppert) and falling in love with a newly arrived young woman (Emmanuelle Béart). Their existence is briefly idyllic, until he is called back to run his family’s china factory in Limoges. Between business…
Taking up more or less from where her last concert film I’m the One That I Want (2000) left off, Margaret Cho continues her exploration of the outer limits of raunch with considerable brio. Like every female stand-up since the dawn of time, Cho’s humor is derived from this disparity…
Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Eastwood, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: tough-yet-sensitive cop…
With Harvard Man, writer-director James Toback returns to his roots…in more ways than one. Not only does he admittedly draw on his own collegiate experiences with acid, but he also reuses plot elements from his first produced script, The Gambler, the 1974 James Caan vehicle directed by Karel Reisz. (Similar…
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious” in irritating tearjerkers such as Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but…
If you’re looking for a horror film to revitalize the genre, keep looking. If you’re looking for a horror movie with believable characters…yes, you’re gonna have to keep looking. But if sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations and mutilated corpses make you jump, and you believe that nothing…
To misappropriate a choice comment from TV-journalist-turned-music-biz-impresario Tony Wilson, I’ll just say “Ian Curtis.” If you know what I mean, great; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, but you should probably read more. That is, one need not be a fan of the late Ian Curtis, the epileptic new-wave seer…
Jesse Peretz, founding member of the Lemonheads, has made the transition from musician to filmmaker over the past decade or so by way of music videos, commercials and MTV interstitials. His debut feature, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, won an award at the Rotterdam Film Festival…
Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on family values and moral absolutes: It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show and, now, the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendence of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets Middle American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck &…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 as much out of desperation as hubris; it cried out, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the past 10 years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood, a position…
Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Award-winning best seller Possession. (OK, that’s an exaggeration: There’s always Michael Bay.) LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be…
Nothing’s more disappointing than the sequel that feels forced rather than organic. It was inevitable Spy Kids, so good Miramax’s Dimension division released it twice last year (once, in a special “long-form” version containing a handful of added scenes), would spawn a sibling; that movie, as neon-bright as the latest…
In case you didn’t happen to read the tagline on the ubiquitous poster, Xander Cage, also known as XXX because he’s tattooed his first initial three times on the back of his neck, is “a new breed of secret agent.” The old breed, we learn pretty quickly, is Bond, James…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as director, is another crime thriller in the vein of, but better than, True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (’96). And it bears a striking resemblance to 1993’s In the Line of Fire, the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Or maybe it resembles…
Hearing that her writer boyfriend (Tristán Ulloa) has been killed in an accident, a Madrid waitress (Paz Vega) named Lucia takes off for an island that figures more centrally in his past than she realized. As in his 1998 masterpiece Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Spanish writer/director Julio Medem here…
Friendship is almost as complicated and compelling as love. It’s romance without the sex, whether between members of the same or opposite genders. Marina (Anna Friel)–pretty, vivacious and rebellious on the outside but insecure and empty on the inside–and Holly (Michelle Williams)–shy, intellectual, also insecure–have been best friends since childhood…
A story of a somewhat troubled young man, who, heavily closeted and socially awkward, took to picking up younger males, drugging them, killing them, then fucking the corpses, chopping them up and sometimes eating them. Cutting back and forth in time between Jeffrey Dahmer’s life of crime and his late…
After endless failed relationships, a middle-aged exterminator and jazz musician (Jeffrey Tambor) begins to think that maybe he’s gay. On his first attempt to pick someone up at a gay bar, however, he meets a beautiful divorcee (Jill Clayburgh), whose recent love life has been equally unsatisfying. The two leap…
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue–one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable: Even…
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, do the math: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, 18 shooting days, a 2-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning Best Director and nine high-profile actors (among them: Julia Roberts, Brad…
