The movie industry’s biggest release of his time involves the CIA dealing with a rogue nuclear weapon that’s landed in the U.S. via American-hating zealots. Is Hollywood tapping into our worst terrors or distancing us from them by placing them on that giant screen of fantasies? Last week it was political potboiler The Sum of […]
A fantasia of Almodóvar’s trademark hang-ups that nonetheless surpasses his previous outings in scope, structure, and heart, the movie is a marvelous, noir-inspired meditation on love, sex, and identity that pulses with florid passion. It may be the best film of the year. Almodóvar’s narrative is a marvel of temporal-shifting beauty, seamlessly moving back and
The film tells the warped tale of a couple of disillusioned, attractive femmes fatale named Manu and Nadine (former real-life porn actresses Karen Bach and Raffaela Anderson) who generate a perverse sense of pleasure through sexual and homicidal mayhem. The depiction of their downfall is gruesomely chronicled porn actress Manu, a gang rape victim that
First-time director Wych Kaosayananda prefers to go by the shortened Kaos. It’s pronounced “chaos,” and now we know why. Someone test this man for attention deficit disorder, for he can’t go ten minutes without destroying something. And not just lighting it up I mean full on decimation. Ballistic has three or four unrelated, pre-planned action
If you start a movie by telling people how it’s going to end, well, telling us how it gets there better be one hell of a good time. And to be sure, Bandits begins with its ending, but the story leading up to the dramatic finale is just about as lame as they come. Doing
Without paying close attention, one could wander into The Banger Sisters expecting a warm and fuzzy friendship yarn delivered by an Oscar-caliber trio of Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon, and Geoffrey Rush. You’d be half right. The cast shows up, but the film substitutes “warm and fuzzy” with vulgar dialogue and gratuitously sexual escapades. This is
Making stories about celebrities who mess up their lives has become a kind of cottage industry these days. Tabloid magazines have thrived on it for years. The E! True Hollywood Story and Behind the Music have extended celeb-thrashing to TV. Finally the big screen has embraced such tales, but Auto Focus proves, once again, there’s
The mythology of Howard Hughes is quite possibly bigger than the man could ever live up to. Already the subject of a handful of movies and over 100 books, the particulars of the Hughes legend are widely known. But leave it to Martin Scorsese to spin the eccentric’s life into a more coherent if sprawling
When underground director Ryuhei Kitamura announced that he’d be making Azumi, his first film inside the Japanese studio system after a successful run of independent films (Versus, Aragami), fans may have had just cause to fear. Not only was he joining the mainstream machine, but he was also directing for the first time a script
Consider a parallel world at the dawn of the new millennium. Unemployment is rampant, national morale is low and the country’s youth are unruly and dangerous. The government’s solution: Banish one school class per year to a deserted island and force them to kill each other. Three days, no rules, one winner. If you’ve never
