Keith Barrett Movies

Five years after achieving commercial and critical success with his film Three Kings, director and screenwriter David O. Russell returns to the more idiosyncratic territory of his earlier work with this intelligent and offbeat comedy. Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) are a married couple who run an existential detective agency where they sift through the lives of their clients in order to discover the source of their angst. The Jaffes' latest client is Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), an environmental activist who has a very large rock and a great deal on his mind; their study of Albert's problems lead Bernard and Vivian to Brad Stand (Jude Law), a public relations executive with a chain of successful variety stores, Huckabees. While publicly allying himself with Albert's environmental initiatives, behind the scenes Brad is running roughshod over responsible land management with little care for the consequences. When Brad learns he's being watched by the Jaffes, he hopes to co-opt them by hiring them himself; however, the plan has unexpected consequences when their questioning leads Brad's girlfriend, well-scrubbed model Dawn (Naomi Watts), into reassessing her life and relationships. Meanwhile, Albert finds himself joining forces with Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a firefighter and fellow environmentalist who has been having second thoughts about Bernard and Vivian's ideas and methods after a long-term investigation and has since fallen under the spell of nihilist poet and philosopher Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert). ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Cheerleader Camp, a routine teen slasher film, follows the adventures of a group of teenage girls who go away to a cheerleader camp for the summer. Alison Betsy Russell, one of the group, is having nightmares. Brent, her boyfriend, has followed her to the camp but really seems more interested in the other girls. When those girls are found murdered, Alison believes she may be the killer. This routine slasher film follows the established formula with lots of attractive young women being killed in bloody and inventive ways and while only average, Cheerleader Camp, also released as Bloody Pom Poms, will please lovers of the genre. ~ Linda Rasmussen, Rovi

With Tomata DuPlenty and Sheela Edwards playing themselves, the storyline of this rock/punk/jazz-filled ghetto blaster of a movie exists in the imagination of DuPlenty, who sees himself as the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust. His mind's eye then traces the history of civilization (different from Kenneth Clark's version) back through World War II and beyond, concluding with a long-ago nuclear holocaust that cleared the planet of life. DuPlenty was a founding member of the influential San Francisco syntheziser-punk ensemble The Screamers; since the group never released a record, this is one of the few places one can hear (and see) what DuPlenty's performance style was like. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi