An alternative-universe Hollywood where a married pair of superstars -- it will not be helpful to think of Cruise and Kidman, Burton and Taylor, Bogart and Bacall -- have appeared together in nine consecutive boffo blockbusters (the samples we see of their work are on a par with the standard …
Oscar-bound dramatization of the far-fetched but true story of six Americans who managed to escape the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and find shelter in Canada by pretending to be actors in a big budget Hollywood space opera. Ben Affleck directs and stars as the CIA “exfiltration” expert who comes …
Big surprise is that John Cassavetes would want to direct so conventional a Hollywood project: a reunion of the stars of The In-Laws, Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, with pretty much the same personas, but this time in a comic twist on Double Indemnity (with a dash of Les Diaboliques). …
Amiable domestic comedy about a nuclear blue-collar family in which everyone’s got a secret, and one’s got several. Writer and director Raymond De Felitta orchestrates some lively passages of household discord, and he has set the action in a flavorful locale, a New England-y “fishing village” in the middle of …
Three-part anthology film, with individual pieces by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh, and the nonagenarian Michelangelo Antonioni: "The Hand," "Equilibrium," and "The Dangerous Thread of Things," in order. Only one of the pieces is a keeper. The first one. The one that provides a full and satisfying moviegoing experience and leaves …
Largely lifeless re-creation of a microscopic piece of recent history, the abduction of the American ambassador by a group of Brazilian radicals in Rio in 1969; a bit like a de-energized Costa-Gavras film of that period. Various factions and individuals are represented fairly, noninflammatorily, but flatly. The average viewer is …
Cold, dry, serious, even somber piece of science fiction, though all of those attributes may seem somewhat exaggerated as a result of the musical score by Michael (Monotonyman) Nyman, who repeats a cluster of half a dozen notes, very slowly, with slight variations, over and over, until you want to …
Big-screen reincarnation of the late-Sixties TV spy spoof, no longer a saboteur of a thriving genre, but just another copycat grave-robber. Diligent homage is paid to the original (“Would you believe...,” “Missed it by that much,” etc.), and the jokes are cranked out industriously, and both Steve Carell and Anne …
David Mamet's Broadway prize-winner, with something approximating a dream cast: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and briefly, bringing in an expensively scented whiff of prosperity, Alec Baldwin. All men, no women. The first five of them play, respectively, the preening tomcat, the drowning rat, the …
The trailer housed 90% of the laughs spread thin throughout this remake of Martin Brest’s superb 1979 yarn about a trio of seniors who decide to knock over a bank. At least the producers didn’t scrimp in the casting department; Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin are perfect substitutes …
A hip, flip, deadpan comedy which washed through the Tarantino floodgate. The hero is a professional hitman in career crisis ("I don't think necessarily what a person does for a living reflects who he is") and in therapy with a psychoanalyst who is terrified of him. A new assignment -- …
A match between Rocky Balboa and the Raging Bull would have set box offices ablaze were it 1983, but back then, Robert “The Greatest Actor of His Generation” De Niro was too big to spar with a cauliflower-eared Rambonehead like Sylvester Stallone. With three decades and countless flops under their …
A money's-worth movie of broad scope, big cars, buttery talk, proud postures, and dubious purpose. The assumption appears to be that everyone will have missed Richard Lester's Cuba (1979) or else that anyone who did catch it didn't like it well enough to remember it. As embarrassingly similar as these …
With its fond, indulgent, film-fan outlook, Howard Zieff's sweet-tempered spoof of early Hollywood seems actually more condescending than a Nathanael West-ian nightmare vision of the movie colony. The Jeff Bridges protagonist, an Iowa farm boy who decides to Go West to become a Zane Grey Western writer, is played as …