Icelandic pop star Bjork is Selma, a Czech immigrant to Washington State in 1964, and how you feel about Bjork will dictate how you feel about *Dancer in the Dark,* for this is entirely her film. It’s easy to understand why her friends were worried for her while she was shooting this — she attacks Selma with an intensity that most trained actors never achieve, embodying the almost pathologically fragile and reactive character to such a degree that you can nearly forget how illogically written a character she is.

Two young girls have been found strangled within a matter of days in the sweltering city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Henry Hearst (Gene Hackman: Enemy of the State), “a pillar of the legal community,” found one of the bodies… or did he put her there? A 10-minute chat with police captain Victor Benezet … more…

Director Michael Ritchie’s The Fantasticks has been on the shelf for five years, and now we know why. A screen adaptation of the long-running Off-Broadway musical, this simultaneously flat and cartoonish film is, at a spare 86 minutes, still overly long and padded out with endless, insipid song-and-dance numbers. Joe McIntyre (ex New Kids of … more…

As an alternative, take me to a movie about the sensual pleasures of food, like Woman on Top, which plays with the intimate connection between eating and sex and teases it out to a very satisfying climax. Oh, yes.

A story of star-crossed lovers and magic fueled by unfulfilled desire, this lovely film encompasses all that is wonderful and sad about hunger… for food, for love, for life.

Fortunately, the karaoke lovers in Duets are much, much better singers than you’ll find hanging around your local k-bar (as, we learn here, these joints are called), and this oddball flick is almost worth seeing for Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis’s duet of ‘Cruisin’. Almost. Most of the cast does their own singing, and they’re pretty damn good, but that can’t help the mess of a story their characters are stuck in.

I love discovering a perfect little film like Little Voice — it restores my faith in movies, which so often gets crushed by the Hollywood crap machine. Of course, this is not a Hollywood movie (though Miramax had a bit of a hand in its making), and there are plenty of people who are just as turned off by twee little British flicks as I’m turned on by them. But this is my site, and here, I decide what’s good and what’s bad.

Franck (Jalil Lespert) returns from university in Paris to his parents’ home for the summer to take a management internship at the factory where his father has worked for 30 years. Mom (Chantal Barré) loves seeing her son in a suit; Dad (Jean-Claude Vallod) is disconcerted to discover that he’s losing Franck to Rouet (Lucien … more…

Lonely, grief-stricken New Yorker Charlie wants to tell us ‘a good story, and this one really happened, I swear,’ in Urbania, director Jon Shear’s grim, grainy nightmare fantasia of violence, hatred, and revenge. But Charlie also asks for ‘a second to figure out the ending.’ In Urbania, based on a play by Daniel Reitz, it’s difficult to tell the truth from sorrowful, wishful-thinking fantasy. And that’s the point.

I can’t tell you how excited I was when I learned that This Is Spinal Tap was not only coming to DVD but also getting a new theatrical release, too. I mean, here I am, the biggest Taphead — or Tapgirl, as some of us femme fans like to be called — in the world, and here’s this great blast from my junior high school past.