reviews

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.

Tears were welling in my eyes as the end credits rolled on Almost Famous, and not because this is a sad story, though it is often bittersweet — no, these were tears of joy for a film that is so complete and perfect and full of life that it swept me up into its world and held me there, and I never wanted it to let me go — and even when it did finally let go, I was happy and satiated. ‘It fills you up’ was my friend’s apt description of Almost Famous.

Like a millennial Wizard of Oz, Nurse Betty is about the power of an all-consuming fantasy to help us cope with life’s disasters. Alternately startling and funny, melancholy and bizarre, this ardently black comedy is nevertheless the most lighthearted work yet from director Neil LaBute, whose previous films are the grimly misanthropic In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors.

War is hell, we’ve learned by now. But what about not-war? The 1999 BBC-TV film Warriors — an unsentimental and heartbreaking story of British peacekeepers in Bosnia — demonstrates that any kind of armed conflict is devastating, even to those not in the immediate line of fire.

Imagine Romeo and Juliet without the chipper bounce, and you’ve got Solomon and Gaenor. Tragedy looms for these two star-crossed lovers from the opening frame of Paul Morrisson’s gloomy and melancholy film — tragedy you know they’ve no hope of escaping — and yet this isn’t a relentless bummer of a story. Instead, it’s a wonderfully morose, rainy-day kind of movie, one to watch curled up on the couch with a cat and a cup of tea. Classical and literate, it lets you pretend you’re edifying yourself while you have a good cry. Kinda like a Bronte novel.