Michael Peyser Movies

Two lonely people thrown together by fate have to overcome their own bad luck if they're to stay together in this drama from South Korean filmmaker Tae-Yong Kim. Chinese-born Anna (Wei Tang) was living in Seattle when she attacked her abusive husband, which led to his death. Anna had been in prison for seven years when she gets word that her mother has died; she's given a two-day furlough to attend the funeral, and Anna is on a bus when she meets Hoon (Bin Hyeon), a dapper stranger who has to borrow money from her in order to catch the ride to Seattle. While Anna is withdrawn and not much interested in talking, Hoon draws her out and they discover they have a fair amount in common. However, while Anna has only two days of freedom, Hoon isn't sure how long he'll be around, since a man with a grudge against him has pledged to kill him. Man Chu (aka Late Autumn) received its North American premiere at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Hollywood A-list director Mark Pellington (The Mothman Prophecies, Arlington Road) and newcomer Catherine Owens team up to break new cinematic ground by co-helming U2 3D -- the first three-dimensional concert film in movie history. The effort intercuts footage culled from several U2 shows on their 2005-2006 Vertigo tour in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Argentina, with Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. performing before rapt audiences. The picture opens with several thematically light rock songs, such as "Beautiful Day" and "Vertigo," but soon segues into more politically conscious material at the hands of social-change advocate Bono and his bandmates, such as the numbers "Bullet the Blue Sky," "Love and Peace or Else," and "Sunday Bloody Sunday"; at one critical point, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is projected high above the audience. Pellington, Owens, and cinematographers Tom Krueger and Peter Anderson make frequent use of a roving camera and multi-layered 3-D effects; they also step away from the approach utilized in the band's previous concert film U2: Rattle and Hum by omitting interviews and focusing exclusively on concert footage. The full version of U2 3D runs 80 minutes; a 56-minute "preview" version ran out of competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

A temp worker is promoted to permanent status and finds his whole world changing as a result in this satiric comedy. Josh (Josh Kornbluth) is an overstuffed aspiring writer who is trying to finish his first novel, but in the meantime he supports himself by working as an office temp. Josh has grown accustomed to the Byzantine world of temporary labor, particularly the bossy secretaries and chilly co-workers, but Josh manages to impress his latest employers enough that they offer to make him a permanent, full-time employee. While a fellow temp who worked for the same company warns Josh that taking the job would be a mistake, Josh takes the plunge anyway, and soon discovers that his fellow employees now embrace him as one of their own. He also discovers that Bob Shelby (Warren Keith), his new boss, is more than a little crazy, and when Bob gives Josh an assignment to mail a series of important letters, John finds that he's suddenly incapable of doing this seemingly simple task. Instead, Josh spends his days working on his book (on company time and on a company computer), with his fellow office drones offering emphatic encouragement. Josh Kornbluth adapted Haiku Tunnel (with the help of John Bellucci and Jacob Kornbluth) from a semi-improvised one-man show Kornbluth created with David Ford; the Kornbluth brothers also directed the film. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

What's it like being the only punk rockers in the biggest Mormon community in the world? Stevo (Matthew Lillard) and Heroin Bob (Michael Goorjian) provide the answer to this and other questions in SLC Punk. Stevo and Bob (whose name is actually an ironic reference to his fear of needles) are two friends fresh out of college who sport mohawks and blue hair, listen to hardcore and try to live up to their own anarchist ideals while figuring out what to do with their lives. Which wouldn't make them unusual in New York or Los Angeles, but they're fish out of water in Salt Lake City, Utah, where they drink beer, chase women and pick fights with "rednecks" along side a mixed bag of metalheads, hippies, hicks and posers who are fellow outcasts in the most clean-cut community in America. In the midst of all this, Stevo's dad hopes his son will follow in his footsteps and study law at Harvard; while Stevo surprisingly has the grades, he's not sure if he wants to go. Featuring a soundtrack of mid-80's punk from The Ramones, Minor Threat, The Dead Kennedys and others, SLC Punk was chosen as the opening-night feature at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Indications were that this action sequel was in trouble before production began, when the male lead from the first film, Keanu Reeves, declined a role in the follow-up. Sandra Bullock returns as Annie Porter, an accident-prone ditz who is thrilled when her boyfriend Alex (Jason Patric) presents her with two tickets for a cruise ship vacation to the Bahamas. The trip is a peace offering presented because Annie has just learned that Alex is a police officer who's been lying to her about his choice of profession. Little does the happy couple know that the disgruntled John Geiger (Willem Dafoe), designer of the ship's computer system, has plotted a violent takeover of the vessel and a diamond hijacking that puts everyone on board in mortal danger. Being the dashing police officer he is, Alex leaps into action and tries to stop Geiger, but not before the ship crashes at top velocity into a Caribbean port town. Sandra Bullock agreed to star in this flop of a sequel in order to get financial backing for a pet project, Hope Floats (1998), a low-budget drama that turned a healthy profit. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

In this high-tech thriller, Dade Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller) has been fascinated with computers all his life; at the age of 11, he was able to break into the computer network of several top Wall Street investment and banking firms, and he nearly caused a major stock market crash in the process. As punishment, Dade was forbidden to use a computer until his 18th birthday, but now that he's of age, he's diving back into his PC head first. Dade meets up with a group of fellow hackers: tough-talking cyber gamer Kate, aka Acid Burn (Angelina Jolie), junior hacker Jesse Bradford, born prankster Cereal Killer (Matthew Lillard), Nikon (Lawrence Mason), named for his photographic memory, and telephone expert Phantom Phreak (Renoly Santiago). Dade and his pals aren't out to destroy systems or do cybercrime for profit; they simply want to know more about the systems they encounter, and they like raising some good-natured havoc. But in their travels through cyberspace, they discover The Plague (Fisher Stevens), a former hacker turned computer security expert with a huge multinational corporation. The Plague has not only done the unthinkable and gone into anti-hacker enforcement, he's secretly allied himself with a group of criminals and is using his expertise to drain funds from corporate bank accounts and transfer them to himself and his mistress, Margo (Lorraine Bracco). The Plague is also smart enough to leave clues that would lead investigators to someone else -- in this case, Dade and his friends -- and has a secret weapon at his disposal, a computer virus that could wipe out the entire world wide web in a matter of minutes. Several sequences for Hackers were shot at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, where coincidentally several months after filming, several students were arrested by F.B.I. agents for their involvement in computer hacking. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Two people fall in love without meeting -- and discover a wealth of complications when they try to get together -- in this romantic comedy. Even though he's about to be married, Brian McVeigh (Kevin Anderson) doesn't want to give up his old apartment, where he can swill beer, scarf pizza, and be as much of a slob as he wants. He decides to hold onto his flat as a weekend clubhouse, but he rents it out to other people during the week. Brian's new tenants, sharing the place on alternating days, are Sam (Matthew Broderick), an aspiring gourmet chef who's just been dumped by his spacey girlfriend Pastel (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and Ellen (Annabella Sciorra), who is stuck in an unhappy marriage and wants a place to work on her art. Ellen mistakenly assumes that Brian is the guy who leaves her gourmet snacks and admiring notes about how much he likes her paintings, and when she sets up a liaison with Brian, she wonders how the seemingly perfect man could be such a loser in person. The Night We Never Met also features Justine Bateman as Brian's fiancée and Christine Baranski as Ellen's best friend. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Thanks to a mix-up at birth, two sets of twins are separated and grow up in radically different social circles. The four baby girls grow up to be Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin-and Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin. One of the Midlers is a ruthless New York CEO, while one of the Tomlins is her air-headed "save the whales" business partner. Thousands of miles away in a Southern industrial town, a blue-collar Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin work for a company that the white-collar Midler plans to devour in a hostile takeover. The "poor" Midler and Tomlin head to New York to argue against the takeover, inevitably getting mixed up with the "rich" Midler and Tomlin. Three of the four twins team up to save the small-town company, while CEO Midler remains as nastily greedy as ever. Clear enough? ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A man who simulates death for a living finds himself unwittingly tied into the real thing in this New York-based suspense drama. Special-effects man Rollie Tyler (Bryan Brown) makes his living simulating gory mayhem and photogenic violence for movies such as "I Dismember Mama." Tyler is given a chance to expand his professional horizons when he's approached by Lipton (Cliff De Young), who introduces himself as an FBI agent and makes an unusual proposal. Mob kingpin Nicholas DeFranco (Jerry Orbach) is willing to testify against his fellow gangsters, but the investigators are worried about his safety. Lipton wants Tyler to help him and his staff fake DeFranco's assassination; if everyone is convinced DeFranco is dead, people will be a lot less likely to look for him. Tyler grudgingly takes the assignment, and while he's able to realistically simulate DeFranco being shot in a crowded restaurant, after the "gag," he discovers that he's been double-crossed, and he's wanted for the murder of the man he just "shot." Tyler hides out with his girlfriend, Ellen (Diane Venora), but he realizes that whoever set him up wants him dead after she's killed by a bullet meant for him. With the help of fellow effects artist Andy (Martha Gehman), Tyler goes underground and tries to unravel the truth behind the Lipton murder. Meanwhile, police detective Leo McCarthy (Brian Dennehy) is convinced that something is not right when he's called to the scene of DeFranco's murder and is certain that the dead body is not the gangster. F/X was followed by a sequel, and later a short-lived TV series. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A petite New Jersey housewife finds self-fulfillment through amnesia in this new wave comedy of errors set in New York's hip '80s downtown scene. Rosanna Arquette stars as Roberta, who turns to the personals for vicarious thrills after her four-year marriage to staid hot tub salesman Gary (Mark Blum) grows stale. Her favorite classified ads trace the romance of Jim (Robert Joy), a struggling musician, and Susan (Madonna), a SoHo vamp who's just narrowly escaped being murdered alongside one of her other boyfriends -- a gangster who recently stole some Egyptian jewelry. Through a series of complicated missteps, Roberta ends up losing her memory and convincing both herself and a broodingly handsome young man named Dez (Aiden Quinn) that she's the elusive, adventurous Susan. Soon, Roberta finds herself being romanced by Dez and pursued separately by her husband, Jim, Susan, and by a murderous mobster who's looking for the stolen jewels. For her second feature outing, which was partially inspired by Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, director Susan Seidelman filled her cast with hipster extras, downtown personalities, and New York thespians. Notable faces include comedian Steven Wright; future indie mainstay John Turturro; future TV stars Michael Badalucco and Laurie Metcalf; punk singer Richard Hell, who also starred in Seidelman's Smithereens; and performance artist Ann Magnunson, who would star in the director's Making Mr. Right. The big dance-club sequence was filmed at Danceteria, the disco that helped launch Madonna's career. The scene, and the film, helped propel "Into the Groove," one of the singer's all-time club classics, into the charts even though it was actually a b-side to the single "Angel." ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi

Leonard Zelig, the "human chameleon", is profiled in this mock-documentary. Director Woody Allen appears as Zelig in scenes that purport to be vintage newsreel clips of the 1920s and 1930s, but are actually clever recreations, "aged" and scratched-up Citizen Kane-style by special-effects maestros Joel Hynick, Stuart Robinson and R. Greenberg Associates. An appropriately pompous narrator details the life and times of Leonard Zelig, whose overwhelming desire for conformity is manifested in his ability to take on the facial and vocal characteristics of whomever he happens to be around at the moment. He shows up at batting practice with Babe Ruth, among William Randolph Hearst's guests as San Simeon, side by side with Pope Pius at the Vatican, and peering anxiously over the shoulder of Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg Rally. Becoming a celebrity in his own right, Zelig inspires a song, a dance craze, and a Warner Bros. biopic. Mia Farrow plays Dr. Eudora Fletcher , a psychiatrist who tries to "reach" Zelig and ultimately falls in love with him (all of Farrow's scenes are in black-and-white and allegedly culled from archive footage; Ellen Garrison, whose resemblance to Farrow is uncanny, plays the older Dr. Fletcher in the interview sequences). In the manner of Reds, the influence of the fictional Leonard Zelig on popular culture is discussed by such real-life notables as Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow and Dr. Bruno Bettenheim. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

At the beginning of this documentary on early cinematographer Edwin S. Porter (1869-1941), director Charles Musser gives some background on the "nickelodeons" or theaters that charged a nickel as an entrance fee, and their early (presumably cheaper) predecessors. The men who set up the programs at the nickelodeons -- including Porter at times -- arranged film clips and still slides to create about a half-hour's worth of entertainment -- they were the first film editors. By 1907, eager U.S. movie-goers were investing one million nickels per day for these shows. Edwin S. Porter was active between 1886-1915 and he is still well-known for his 1903 Great Train Robbery, the world's first narrative film, all of 12 minutes long. (It should be noted that Porter's filmography after he lost his position as head of production in Thomas Edison's studio in 1908 is not included in this documentary.) Porter worked first with multi-shot sequences as early as 1901 ("The Execution of Czolgosz" on the assassination of President McKinley, using documentary footage and a staged dramatization), running through one (small) spool of film for one sequence, and another for an additional sequence, usually from another angle or of another scene. Instead of an editor at a nickelodeon putting together two film sequences, Porter was doing the sequencing as the cinematographer. Taking this idea one step further, he pioneered "overlapping continuity," as in his landmark 1902 Life of an American Fireman. In this example of the technique, he put cameras inside and outside a burning building, and in his completed film, he first showed a rescue sequence from the inside, followed by the same sequence from the outside. In the 1930s when that film was recut with methods developed by Porter's most well-known immediate successor, David Wark Griffith, the "Fireman" film was shown with alternating interior-exterior views, from the start of the rescue to the end. Director Charles Musser comments on this later style, saying that in Porter's early years, audiences were not yet visually sophisticated enough to understand the technique of multiple, simultaneous perspectives. (At the same time, other critics maintain that Porter himself intercut the scenes.) Another pioneer in a visual medium, Pablo Picasso came of age artistically during the development of these cinematic techniques, and it is curious that his own style of showing multiple, simultaneous viewpoints of a figure in one image parallels the cinematic visions emerging first with Edwin Porter and then with D.W. Griffith. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi