Reviewers searching for ways to describe the cabaret singer Baby Jane Dexter often use words like “garrulous” and “bawdy.” True, one hears traces of every barrelhouse belter from Lizzie Miles to Belle Barth in her blue-tinged Big Mama baritone, but since I first became aware of this formidable performer at old, defunct clubs like Eighty-Eights and the Firebird, I have rarely witnessed so profound a change in an artist’s style and repertoire. The refined folks who prefer soft, subtle, smoky voices like June Christy, Peggy Lee and Julie London may find her an acquired taste. God knows, she’s no Blossom Dearie. She’s not even a blossom.  read more »

Lake City
Running time 92 minutes
Written and directed by Hunter Hill and Perry Mowore
Starring Sissy Spacey, Troy Garity, Rebecca Romijn, Keith Carradine

Sissy Spacek could read her grocery list and hold my attention. So I am not surprised that her absorbing performance in Lake City makes an otherwise small, unexceptional little film seem a lot more important than it is. She’s a filmmaker’s best friend. Throw her some buckshot and she’ll convince you it’s caviar.

The filmmakers with a lot to be grateful for this time around are writer-directors Hunter Hill and Perry Moore, two transplanted Southerners who have based their movie on a traumatic childhood incident in Mr.  read more »

The Dukes
Running time 96 minutes
Written by James Andronica and Robert Davi
Directed by Robert Davi
Starring Robert Davi, Chazz Palminteri, Miriam Margolyes, Frank D’Amico, Peter Bogdanovich

Another modest comedy, The Dukes is about a has-been Hollywood doo-wop group popular in the 1960s, and the elaborate, sometimes larcenous things they do to make a comeback in 2007. Robert Davi, a rumpled-face actor who has made a career out of playing terrorists, thugs and villains, most notably Colombian drug lord Franz Sanchez in the 1989 James Bond thriller, License to Kill, makes his directorial debut with The Dukes, which he also co-wrote and produced.  read more »

How About You
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Jean Pasley
Directed by Anthony Byrne
Starring Hayley Atwill, Orla Brady, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Fricker, Imelda Staunton, Joss Ackland

How About You is a confection about Christmas in a senior citizen’s home in Ireland that has fallen on hard times. The feisty residents are impossible, the health department is threatening foreclosure, the staff has deserted the place like rats on the Titanic, and a young girl named Ellie (Hayley Atwill, who starred last year in Woody Allen’s ill-fated Cassandra’s Dream) finds herself left in charge while her unhappy, pragmatic older sister, Kate (Gate Theatre alumnus Orla Brady), who runs the place, eschews the responsibility and takes a week off to visit their ailing mother.  read more »

Quantum of Solace
Running Time 106 minutes
Written by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade
Directed By Marc Forster
Starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Mathieu Amalric, Olga Kurylenko

James Bond movies long ago outgrew the original fun and thrills invented by Ian Fleming, and they’ve been coasting on noise and luck ever since. Quantum of Solace, the 22nd entry in the interminable franchise, is one of the most pointless, chaotic and forgettable of them all. It is also one of the dullest.

The Bond checklist is always a bit like Mexican food—spicy and bloating for the moment, promising exotic locations, tech toys, outrageously expensive cars ready to be demolished at random, outrageous villains thinking up inhumanly monstrous tortures, secret agents navigating humanly impossible escapes, sexy girls wearing Band-Aids, and mindless satisfaction guaranteed.  read more »

The Guitar
Running time 95 minutes
Written by Amos Poe
Directed by Amy Redford
Starring Saffron Burrows, Paz de la Huerta, Isaach De Bankolé

The Guitar is a modern New York fable about a woman simultaneously dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job and diagnosed with inoperable cancer. At this point, what good are Reiki massages, guidance counselors and Hallmark cards? So mousey Melody (Saffron Burrows) short-term leases a loft penthouse, orders a Vera Wang bed, orders from every restaurant in Greenwich Village and maxes out her credit cards. Indulging in every childhood fantasy in a materialistic orgy sponsored by Visa, she becomes the envy of everyone trapped in a gray and meaningless world who would happily go on a rampage of luxury objects promising redemption if they could just afford it.  read more »

Gardens of the Night
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Damian Harris
Starring Gillian Jacobs, Evan Ross, Tom Arnold

Riding in on the crest of praise from assorted international film festivals, Gardens of the Night is another newfangled kind of horror movie, unsuitable for Halloween. No vampires here, and no slice-and-dice gore from the Saw franchise, either. The monsters are all people, as ordinary-looking as movie critics, but twice as lethal. This is a dossier on the ramifications of child abuse that leave perfect children emotionally destroyed for the rest of their lives. It is hard to watch, but worth every sobering moment because of the things you learn about one of life’s most grueling subjects.  read more »

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
Running time 93 minutes
Written and directed by Mark Herman
Starring Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Richard Johnson, Sheila Hancock

At the movies, as in life, there is nothing more harrowing to think about or painful to observe than children in peril. At a time when a lot of people will not go near a film about the Holocaust, it’s quite brave to make a new one (there are three coming out before Christmas). The Boy in the Striped Pajamas shows an aspect of the greatest atrocity in the history of civilization through the eyes of children, which makes it doubly risky.  read more »

Where have all the monsters gone? As a kid, I was gung-ho for Lugosi, Karloff and Chaney, not to mention Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and the rest of the more sophisticated Warner Brothers stock company turning out classy thrillers like The Beast With Five Fingers. Eventually, the legitimate monsters of my youthful mania turned into gruesome parodies in the air-conditioned, garishly colored trash that came out of England’s Hammer Films and the hysterical comic-book parodies from cheapjack American-International. I mean, let’s face it: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy were master creations fashioned by the special-effects wizards at Universal, and are still often copied but never duplicated.  read more »

I’ve Loved You So Long
Running Time 115 minutes
Written and directed by Philippe Claudel
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius

In the solemn, touching French drama I’ve Loved You So Long, the bilingual British-born actress Kristin Scott Thomas, currently starring on Broadway in a much-overrated production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, returns to the screen, where she shines best. With mousey brown hair and not a speck of makeup, she plays Juliette Fontaine, a woman whose name delivers a more delicate lift than any of her disheartening experiences in life. Once a respected doctor from a good family, Juliette has lost everything she once held dear—her husband, her career, her child, her friends and her family.  read more »