CAST: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Sonny Chiba, Michael Parks, Chiaki Kuriyama, Julie Dreyfus, Michael Madsen, David Carradine
SYNOPSIS: Tarantino's first film in six years sends a professional killer (Thurman) on the trail of colleagues who betrayed her.
WHAT WE SAID: Times film critic Steve Persall gave the first film a B-plus. "Kill Bill so far isn't as concise as Reservoir Dogs, or as perfectly elliptical as Pulp Fiction, and not as comically cool as Jackie Brown," he wrote in his October review. "But Tarantino's fourth feature film has enough energy, fueled by his encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, to make it an event for worshipers at the altar of Q. Is it worth the wait? Absolutely."
MPAA RATING: R; graphic violence, harsh profanity, sexual situations
RUNNING TIME: 112 min.
Timeline
DIRECTOR: Richard Donner
CAST: Paul Walker, Frances O'Connor, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly, Ethan Embry, Anna Friel
SYNOPSIS: Walker plays a college student transported to the 14th century to save his father (Connolly).
WHAT WE SAID: Times reviewer Philip Booth gave the film a C. "Even the most intrepid time traveler might have trouble journeying far enough back to find a time-travel movie as uninspired as Timeline, an unsatisfying adaptation of the bestselling Michael Crichton novel," Booth wrote.
MPAA RATING: PG-13; violence, profanity
RUNNING TIME: 116 min.
Tokyo Godfathers
DIRECTOR: Satoshi Kon
CAST: Toru Emori, Aya Okamoto, Yoshiaki Umegaki
SYNOPSIS: A bum, a transvestite and a teen runaway protect an abandoned baby in Tokyo's grimmest neighborhood in an anime film in Japanese with English subtitles.
WHAT WE SAID: Persall gave an A- to the film, which opened in local movie theaters last week. "Though American filmmakers consider animation suitable only for fairy tales, Japanese anime has long used the art form for deeply serious, down-to-earth storytelling," he wrote. "(The film's) animation style is rich in background and character details - as naturalistic as The Triplets of Belleville was impressionistic - yet may look a bit clunky by computer-generated standards. Japanese anime is keeping the classic, hand-drawn, 2D technique alive because filmmakers realize that personal attention yields emotion, not just mechanized spectacle."
MPAA RATING: PG-13; mature themes, violent images, language and some sexual material
RUNNING TIME: 92 min.
Casa de los Babys
DIRECTOR: John Sayles
CAST: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Marcia Gay Harden, Daryl Hannah, Susan Lynch, Vanessa Martinez, Rita Moreno, Lili Taylor, Mary Steenburgen
SYNOPSIS: Writer-director Sayles (Sunshine State, Lone Star) focuses on a half-dozen disparate women awaiting approval of child adoptions in a Latin American country.
WHAT WE SAID: Persall gave the film a C-plus. The six women waiting in an unidentified Latin American country spend their days sunbathing, eating and talking, Persall wrote. "Any other filmmaker might have them championing their causes in opposition to bureaucracy or exposing some black market shenanigans. But this is John Sayles, the patron saint of independent filmmakers. . . . Why he decided to make Casa de los Babys, or at least why his reasoning isn't clear on screen, is a mystery."
