Badlands (1973)

A Brazilian reflection on the vanity of human — or at least of masculine — wishes and the permanence of the eternal feminine

What is it about Frank Darabont and prisons? Or, for that matter, Stephen King and prisons? Having already idealized prison life in his dreadful version of Mr. King’s dreadful Shawshank Redemption a few years ago, Mr Darabont is at it again in the even more dreadful King story, The Green Mile. In Shawshank, although most…

My first thought about The Waterboy, directed by Frank Coraci, was that I had already seen just about as many movies as I would ever need to see in which Adam Sandler attempts to exploit his arrested development for comic purposes. But then the Washington Post ran a “Style” section piece by Sharon Waxman taking…

Star Maps, written and directed by Miguel Arteta, tells the story of Carlos (Douglas Spain) who comes from his grandparents’ house in Mexico, much against his mother’s wishes, to live with the rest of his family in Los Angeles: his father, Pepe (Efraim Figueroa), his mother, Theresa (Martha Velez), his sister, Maria (Lysa Flores) and…

Julie Taymor’s film is disappointingly like other biopics featuring artistic celebrities in using their art as an excuse for exploring their sex lives.

A Chef in Love (or, to give it its French title, Le Mille et Un Recettes d’un Cuisinier Amoureux) by Nana Djordjadze is a Franco-Georgian film which takes the fast-track to success by foreign language films: include lots of food. Set in the Caucasus in 1920, it is the story of a French chef, Pascal…