Letterboxd — Your life in film

Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s second feature (after KICKING AND SCREAMING) has about as much romantic charm and wit as the first, which is pretty much. Cast in the form of a nostalgic art movie like Jules and Jim, it recounts the obsession of its hero (Eric Stoltz) with the former lovers of his girlfriend (Annabella Sciorra), which leads him to spy on one of them, a successful novelist (Chris Eigeman), by adopting the name and identity of a friend (Carlos Jacott)…

Lightly comic agitprop about homophobic bigotry in a small southern town--sincere, hokey, and artless--by first-time writer-director Kelli Herd. Various complications ensue when the rumor spreads that something in the drinking water turns people gay. In spite of a couple of able actors (Keri Jo Chapman and Teresa Garrett) as the two leads, estranged wives and best friends who become lovers, most of the performances and direction call to mind little theater productions, and the storytelling and sense of character remind…

The most intellectually heroic of Jean-Luc Godard’s early features (1966) was inspired by his reading an article about suburban housewives day-tripping into Paris to turn tricks for spending money. Marina Vlady plays one such woman, followed over a single day in a slender narrative with many documentary and documentarylike digressions. But the central figure is Godard himself, who whispers his poetic and provocative ruminations over monumentally composed color ‘Scope images and, like James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous…

Vengeance may be the most overrated and overused theme in movies, but director Kevin Costner makes effective use of it in this classic western tale in which a feud between “freegrazers” (Costner, Robert Duvall, Diego Luna, Abraham Benrubi) and an evil rancher (Michael Gambon) culminates in an extended gunfight. Costner and screenwriter Craig Storper wisely let Duvall take charge most of the time, so that the movie begins to falter only after Costner takes over as lead. Curiously, for a…

Not as good as its reputation would suggest, this Elia Kazan-directed 1954 melodrama about union corruption on the New York docks gets pretty pretentious in spots, and Leonard Bernstein’s tortured score doesn’t help. But it’s hard to deny that Marlon Brando’s performance as a dock worker and ex-fighter who finally decides to rat on his gangster brother (Rod Steiger) is pretty terrific. Budd Schulberg’s script has flavor and bite, and Boris Kaufman’s crisp black-and-white cinematography in Hoboken and environs is…

Satire that scores is apt to offend some people, which may help to explain why this politically incorrect comedy was shelved by Paramount for a year, then dumped into the market without press screenings. Scripted by the irreverent Paul Rudnick (ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES, IN & OUT), it’s about a Jewish American Princess (Lisa Kudrow) teaming up with a controversial rap artist (Damon Wayans). It’s no masterpiece, but I found it consistently good-hearted and sometimes hilarious, and the sparse crowd I saw…

I was fully prepared to enjoy this sex comedy and musical about young couples in Madrid playing musical beds, even if the songs were second-rate and the performances a little slapdash--in this context, feeling and vulnerability often count for more than professionalism. But despite a brisk opening and some agreeable (if sloppy) choreography at the very end, I was less than tickled by the premise of David Serrano’s scriptthat the characters lie to and betray one another as naturally as…

I have no objection to soap opera when it’s delivered with conviction and a sense of urgency, but this sappy tale about the widow (Sofia Milos) of a Portuguese fisherman in New Bedford, Massachusetts, being wooed by an English cardsharp (Jason Isaacs) who’s posing as a tycoon held my interest only moderately. I was periodically distracted (though not intrigued) by the heroine’s rebellious daughter (Emmy Rossum), who tries to play matchmaker between her mother and the cardsharp while he’s teaching…

A stickler could complain that Luis Fernandez de la Reguera’s 2002 documentary about his late friend, actor and comedian Michael Morra, never gets around to explaining how he picked up the moniker Rockets Redglare. In fact, the intimacy of this portrait may be a disadvantage: Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, Alex Rockwell, Nick Zedd, and Julian Schnabel are among those interviewed, and it seems like practically everyone loved this guy despite (if not because of) his excessive…

Fox News’s attempt to stop the publication of Al Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Rightbecause its mocking subtitle supposedly infringed on the network’s fair and balanced trademarkechoes the efforts of Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration to silence criticism by labeling it unpatriotic. Also questionable is the lawsuit launched by Kraft against another flaky individual, Wicker Park erotic comic-book artist and Web designer Stu Helm, for…

Richard Brooks’s 1958 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was somewhat bowdlerized, but at least it’s intelligent and entertaining within its chosen limits. His second Williams adaptation (1962) is literally a form of emasculation that offers little indication of what made the original play interesting (especially in Elia Kazan’s stage production), despite the fact that Paul Newman and Geraldine Page are called on to reprise their original roles — as a hustler returning to his southern…