Badlands (1973)

Normally, I make it a rule never to go to basketball movies (especially if they star basketball players) or those whose titles are in ebonics. But Spike Lee is a talented director about whose work it is still possible to be hopeful, in spite of a string of disappointments. He Got Game turns out to…

One tries to be fair, of course. I admit up front that I don’t much like either Matthew McConaughey or Jennifer Lopez, and I acknowledge that it is very likely that my dislike is what accounts for what seems to me the total lack of “chemistry” between the two of them in Adam Shankman’s The…

An investigation into her family’s darkest secrets by Wunderkind director, Sarah Polley

Moralizing thieves seem to appeal to a Hispanic audience — rather than the merely immoral thieves who apparently appeal to the rest of us

20 Dates by Myles Berkowitz is a charming little pseudo-documentary about what happened when the author, an impecunious independent filmmaker, unexpectedly got $60,000 to produce a film “combining my two biggest failures, my personal life and my professional life.” His gimmick is to be his own star and to go out on 20 dates, recording…

You have to start watching right at the beginning of La Cérémonie, Claude Chabrol’s latest addition to one of the oddest and most compelling bodies of cinematic work in the world. Why does the maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), answer the questions of her would-be employer, Catherine Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bisset) in that odd way? Why is…