Directing, co-writing and starring, Matt Dillon does a pretty solid job. Set in a modern-day Cambodia full of outcasts and fugitives, the plot slowly curdles from globe-trotting crime thriller into primal psycho-weirdness. Dillon never shakes off the second-hand influences, notably David Lynch and Apocalypse Now, but a rich cosmopolitan texture is added by an eccentric cast including Gerard Depardieu, Stellan Skarsgård and James Caan.
Originally a TV mini series, this is a satisfying, three-hour adaptation of Larry McMurty's offbeat and poignant take on Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. A strong cast (Anjelica Houston, Sam Elliott, Peter Coyote) get blown off the screen by Jack Palance as a grizzled, dusty old trapper.
Quirky variant on the Frankenstein riff. Klaus Kinski is a scientist working on a space station with his android assistant Max404 (Don Opper, who co-wrote). Max is going through android adolescence—he's restless, sulky, curious about sex. Then a trio of escaped convicts invade, and one of them's a girl. Funny and compelling, and worth catching for Opper's geeky performance alone.
Mesmerising Japanese study of voyeurism and eroticism. Shot in black and white but colourfully performed by Asuka Kurosawa as a repressed wife who's blackmailed by a stranger into—wait for it—masturbating in public places. In lesser hands it'd be tat, but there's a Cronenberg-like claustrophobia to the seediness. Porn, then, but arty porn.
Volker Schlöndorff's hallucinatory adaptation of Günter Grass' novel is a slow build. Like Apocalypse Now, with whom it shared the 1979 Palme D'Or at Cannes, it's an allegorical war movie with a trippy central conceit—three-year-old Oskar (David Bennent), disgusted by petty-bourgeois post-war Poland, refuses to mature into adulthood and instead opts for a surreal journey into the dark heart of Nazism. While his Danzig neighbourhood is consumed by Hitler frenzy, Oskar is subjected to Nazi dwarves, decapitated donkeys and suicide by raw eel overdose.
Don't expect John McTiernan's blustery military thriller to deliver the same buzzing chemistry between John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson as Pulp Fiction. The two stars barely even meet as Travolta's bad-ass investigator puzzles out the mystery of Jackson's missing Ranger instructor via a series of twist-heavy flashbacks. McTiernan delivers balls-out action, but he's a total hack, mauling all the subtlety out of a potentially intriguing yarn.
Fighting free from the monumental shadows of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman, Gary Winick's Tadpole—hewn from that same Upper East Side social milieu and following the vaguely familiar unrequited infatuations of Aaron Stanford's 15-year-old Voltaire-quoting, stepmom-fancying preppy—is 77 unapologetic and mostly witty minutes of romantic ephemera.
Horrible in theory, actually pretty funny in fact. Carrey and Daniels wouldn't do a sequel, so two lookalikes were contracted for a slung-together, conceptually tasteless prequel to the Farrelly brothers' hit farce. So they're at school, being heroically stupid, totting up comic misunderstandings and unwittingly doing good deeds. Sweet and titter-worthy, despite itself.
As the franchise gets ever more desperate, any wit is sacrificed for diminishing returns of grosser grossness and louder loudness. If you want to see Jason Biggs' pubic hair find its way into the wedding cake while he does his 'embarrassed' face for the thousandth time, this is the movie for you. Directed by Bob Dylan's son, for Christ's sakes.
