To say that Showtime is the year’s best glossy studio entertainment film thus far may be the ultimate in faint praise. The first quarter is always pretty bad–following the majors’ traditional end-of-the-year marketing/release orgies–but 2002 has been several degrees worse than usual. From the dual Pearce-ings of The Count of…

In the mid-1980s, San Francisco-based Paul Pena–a black blues singer/guitarist best known for writing the Steve Miller Band hit “Jet Airliner”–was listening to shortwave radio when he came upon a broadcast of “throatsinging,” a vocal style from the tiny region of Tuva, then part of the Soviet Union. The technique…

With its catchy (if arguably distasteful) title and first-rate cast, How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog promises vastly more than it delivers. An L.A.-based Brit playwright in a slump (Kenneth Branagh) tries to fix his latest play, while arguing with his wife (Robin Wright Penn) about whether to have a…

“Glean” is a word not often used in English, except in the context of gleaning information. But in French it has a more common, more specific use–to pick up produce or other foodstuffs left behind by the harvest. In the mind of veteran filmmaker Agnès Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond), it…

After a long absence from American screens, British stage director Richard Eyre makes his return with an alternately depressing and uplifting drama about Dame Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and the heroic efforts of her husband, John Bayley, to care for her, despite his own advanced age and generally…

John Q. Archibald (Denzel Washington), a perfect working-class Everyman, is struggling just to make ends meet; bad turns to way worse when his 9-year-old son (Daniel E. Smith) is suddenly diagnosed with a heart defect that will kill him within weeks unless he can get a transplant. But John, who…

In May 1997, conductor Zubin Mehta recruited Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern) to mount a stage presentation of Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, which was based on an old Chinese story. “Usually,” Mehta says, “Turandot is full of Chinese clichés…it looks like a big Chinese restaurant.” So it seemed like…

Just in time to take our tired minds off the twin terrors of Osama and Enron comes The Mothman Prophecies, an enjoyable, if utterly stupid, upscale entry in the old Amityville Horror genre. (That is, a horror film allegedly based on spooky and inexplicable real-life events.) The fashionable sheen is…

Miguel Piñero was poet, playwright and actor–and thief, liar and junkie. He was in Sing Sing by his early 20s, the iconic leader of New York’s Puerto Rican artistic movement by 30, a dead junkie by 40; yet the causes for Piñero’s life trajectory remain largely unanswerable. Leon Ichaso’s new…

Bangkok Dangerous, by twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, is an aggressively commercial genre piece that, like some recent Korean releases, has been clearly influenced by the Asian gangster genre once dominated by the now-ailing Hong Kong industry. And if the Pang brothers’ goal is to demonstrate to the world…

Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he still would be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…

Had anyone asked me back in September how 2001 was looking, I would have been tempted to rate it as even worse than the dismal 2000 (which suffered further from proximity to the wondrous 1999). But my assessment shifted during the final quarter of the year–half because of some fine…

Having given us The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 and The Green Mile five years later, director Frank Darabont finally busts his way out of prison with his third feature, The Majestic (which, incidentally, has the worst ad art since Green Mile). Working from a script by Michael Sloane–no Stephen King…

At 73, Jacques Rivette is one of the oldest of the original French New Wave directors–older by a few years than the 70-year-old Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut (who would have been 69), younger only than 79-year-old Alain Resnais and 81-year-old Eric Rohmer. And, like his remaining compatriots, he has…

In the new low-budget indie comedy Haiku Tunnel, former temporary office worker Josh Kornbluth plays “Josh Kornbluth,” a temporary office worker who, early in the film, faces a premature midlife crisis–whether to stay a temp or “go perm.” After great hesitation, the company makes him an offer he can’t refuse–they’ll…

Thanks to his justly lauded work as action choreographer on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Yuen Wo Ping is among the most famous creators of Hong Kong action in the United States. Following the latter film’s astonishing success, Miramax, with a prod from Quentin Tarantino, has wisely…

This may be a strange time to release a thriller about the dangers of corrupt law enforcement, but Training Day–with no explosions, no cheap thrills, no international conspiracies–is about as distant from current East Coast realities as possible. Still, that doesn’t mean that it qualifies as escapism. This gripping police…

Together is the second feature from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson, whose 1998 Fucking Amal was shown here two years ago under the title Show Me Love, renamed for obvious reasons. Together is an ensemble piece–a sharp, perceptive look at a Swedish commune in a suburb of Stockholm, circa 1975. That…

The directorial debut of actress-turned-screenwriter Agnès Jaoui (Same Old Song, Un Air de Famille), The Taste of Others is a work of delicate observation, falling somewhere between romantic drama and comedy of manners. Mr. Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri, the director’s husband and co-writer) is a wealthy businessman whose life leaves little…

After nearly a decade’s absence from the big screen, Suture auteurs Scott McGehee and David Siegel finally deliver a second feature with The Deep End, an exciting, sharply realized melodramatic film noir, based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which was also the source for the 1949 Max…

Chopper, the first feature from Australian video director Andrew Dominik, is a strong, effective but often stomach-churning portrait of notorious Aussie criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. It can be characterized as “sensational”–in both the positive and negative senses of the word. According to the filmmakers, Chopper Read is a legend Down…

Actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995; released in the United States in 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii,…