Word: writer-director
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...know--lots of sex, dope and bad hairstyles. An increasingly disheveled Suzette still hangs on to the old lifestyle, while her pal--they aren't really sisters--has gone rich, suburban, uptight. Suzette visits Vinnie, looking for a loan, and manages to loosen up both her and her family. Writer-director Dolman's comedy isn't exactly a barrel of emotional surprises, but its great cast underachieves admirably. There are worse ways to pass 94 minutes. --By Richard Schickel
...idea for his latest film, The Magdalene Sisters, from a documentary he happened upon while channel surfing. If ever creative inspiration isn't so close at hand, writer-director Peter Mullan can look to his own bleak Glaswegian upbringing. The visuals would certainly be striking. Mullan's family led an outwardly prosperous life in a large pillared house that his mother instructed him and his seven siblings to tell people was owned, not rented. The lie fostered an illusion of affluence, but behind the façade, says Mullan, "we didn't even have any furniture. We were dirt poor...
...hard to do when the media are in one of their postmodern feeding frenzies. He's soon running around like a fugitive in a three-door farce. Pacino, with his sad, baggy eyes and slightly depressed air, is perfect as the harassed auteur of his own misery. And writer-director Andrew Nicoll is a visually witty operative with a nice ear for the verbal side of Hollywood lunacy as well. Sure, Simone will put you in mind of Wag the Dog, in which the darker political consequences of fooling around with Mother Nature were stressed. But within its own wacky...
...lives with his two kids (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin) and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix): gigantic crop circles. Are they an elaborate prank or the harbinger of an alien race's intervention? Given M. Night Shyamalan's earlier hits (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable), you can forget prank. The writer-director wants you to believe in signs, from beyond the grave or the solar system, from the Bible or a good man's troubled heart - for Graham is still in mourning for his wife's death...
...will recognize them. The whole family works for a federal espionage agency that's smart enough to hire eager kids as spies - hey, this is a fantasy - but mostly stumbles around in a bureaucratic fog. In Spy Kids 2, sequel to his surprise hit of last year, writer-director Robert Rodriguez imagines that a Transmooker has gone missing - that is, a gizmo just a little bigger and blinkier than a VCR remote but able to power down the whole world. The kids have to recover it before it falls into the wrong hands. But this movie's delight...