Year: 1999

Like writer/director Mike Judge’s previous endeavors — TV’s King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-Head — Office Space, his first live-action film is, at first glance, lightweight and slight, if highly amusing. But lurking beneath the sitcom surface is pointedly drawn satire that uses the tiniest of minutia of an ordinary, well-known environment — like KOTH’s middle-class suburb or, here, the corporate workplace — to throw into sharp focus the things that we all love, hate, and love to hate about everyday American life in the 90s.

Portraits Chinois (Shadowplay) plays like a less-goofy, French version of Friends, following a group of young, single Parisians over the course of a year or so as they deal with career frustration and watch their love lives implode.

Waiter, waiter! This food is terrible! And the portions are too small! That’s kinda the way I feel about The Faculty. It’s another bad, bad, bad installment in Kevin Williamson’s neverending quest to send-up teen horror flicks, and it doesn’t even get all the dumb cliches right. If you can’t expect a teen horror flick to deliver lots of gratuitously naked breasts and kids having gratuitous sex and then getting gratuitously killed, what has this world come to? I mean, really!

Poor Chad Lowe. He hadn’t been doing too badly for himself — he won an Emmy for the series Life Goes On and recently did a nice guest turn on ER. But if the new Showtime Original movie The Apartment Complex is any kind of indication, he’s about to join his brother Rob down in the bowels of the entertainment industry: cheesy made-for-TV movies. Put The Apartment Complex back-to-back with Rob’s last TV flick, Atomic Train, and you’d have the makings one of those little variety packs of cheese balls. You know, the kind that come rolled in nuts.

I don’t mean to belittle Kamal’s death but rather the sheer apathy that has resulted in his story being untold until now. Punitive Damage tells his powerful, disturbing tale, which needs to be seen by anyone concerned about justice in a world seemingly increasingly hostile to the concept.

I won’t be surprised to soon hear female moviegoers professing to be madly in love with Tim Roth. 1900 — yes, that’s a name — is the kind of movie character with whom women fall madly in love, and infatuation like that invariably spills over onto the actor portraying him. Not bad for a guy whose career has mostly been spent playing hoodlums and heavies.