Leading Ladies: January 2006

In limited release

• The New York Times's Manohla Dargis says Bubble, director Steven Soderbergh's quirky drama about murder and a love triangle in a small-town Ohio doll factory (and which is being released in theaters, on DVD and on cable TV simultaneously), is "Easier to admire than love... a fascinating exercise that seems calculated to repel most audiences, which probably suits Mr. Soderbergh just fine."
• Of Imagine You & Me, a comedy in which a bride falls in love with another woman on her wedding day, the New York Times's Manohla Dargis says the movie is "Enervating trifle."
• "Albert Brooks may have come up with the funniest movie premise of the year in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," says USA Today's Claudia Puig of Brooks's comedy in which he plays, well, himself, sent abroad by the U.S. government to investigate America's attitudes about other cultures.
• End of the Spear, a drama about a man from a violent Amazon jungle tribe who comes to care about the relatives of a man he killed, is "a childish and visually repetitive movie, ham-fisted, proselytizing and overtly simplified," says the Chicago Tribune's Allison Benedikt.
• The New York Times's Manohla Dargis says about Why We Fight, a documentary that looks at the American military's war effort, "Even those of radical political persuasion might find it hard to accept [director Eugene] Jarecki's argument that American militarism is, underneath the talk about freedom and democracy, a simple question of dollars. If nothing else, such thinking ignores that wars are fought not just by governments working in concert with big business and lobbyists, but also by people."
• Of Pizza, a quirky dramedy about the friendship between a lonely overweight teen and a 30-something slacker pizza boy, the Hollywood Reporter's Sheri Linden says, it's "a small-scale character piece that genuinely likes its protagonists... But for all its quirky touches, the comedy cleaves to formula in its depiction of how they challenge and change each other."
• Of The Libertine, TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh says, "Johnny Depp's coruscating, rigorously uningratiating performance as debauched, self-destructive 17th-century aristocrat John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, is the glue that doesn't quite hold together first-time director Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of Stephen Jeffreys' 1994 play."
• The Los Angeles Times's Carina Chocano says the lesbian romantic comedy April's Shower "suffers from a malady common to tiny indies of the let's-put-on-a-show variety ‑- it strains for irrepressibly nutty, but lands squarely in annoying."

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