Critics savaged it and audiences avoided it, and it's easy to see why: Everything about Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School (Sony) is awkward and forced, from the clunky title to John Goodman's role as a car-accident victim who gasps and squeaks out his final words of wisdom over an excruciatingly long 103 minutes. But while it's a trite, paint-by-numbers redemption saga in which widower Robert Carlyle learns to live and love again through the power of dance, it's also a refreshingly dark, weird, and sad twist on the usual rom-com clichés…
Life after Bond can be tricky: How do you continue to have a movie career if everyone will forever associate you with one role? Pierce Brosnan solves that problem by taking a sharp left turn in The Matador (Weinstein), a stylish and entertaining black comedy that casts Brosnan as a washed-up, debauched professional killer who strikes up an unlikely friendship with average-Joe Greg Kinnear. Just that one shot of Brosnan padding through a hotel lobby wearing nothing but skin-tight black underwear and a pair of boots should wipe the slate clean for him…
Best known for his turn as the most neurotic of the two brainiacs in Dazed & Confused, Adam Goldberg brings the same restless, searching energy to I Love Your Work (ThinkFilm), which ambitiously attempts to uncover the pitfalls of celebrity life. Unfortunately, La Dolce Vita this movie isn't, with Giovanni Ribisi making for a third-rate Marcello Mastroianni as a paranoid actor fending off stalkers and hangers-on…
How bad can a film with Johnny Depp prancing around as a 17th century wit who runs afoul of England's Charles II be? To answer that question, have a look at The Libertine (Weinstein), an adaptation of the Stephen Jeffreys play that probably could be duller and uglier, but only if played at half-speed and projected on a puddle of mud…
The Rolling Stone who made Keith Richards look stable, the late Brian Jones deserves a biopic much less facile than Stoned (Universal), which at least seems to recognize that it has a fascinating subject, but loses sight of it every time the focus shifts to a popular, if improbable, theory that his drowning death was no accident. Leo Gregory's dull turn as Jones doesn't help.