Roland Emmerich's widest view of disaster to date: the sky-high eruption of Yellowstone (Old Faithful gone Vesuvius), the toppling of the Washington Monument and St. Peter's Basilica (the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower would be so old-hat), the block-by-block collapse of Los Angeles (a rented limo outrunning the …
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 …
Fox Family Films presents an animated alternative to current Disney, but as little an alternative as possible: a spunky feminist heroine (but why, at age eighteen, does she have no memory of herself at eight?); a callow ineffectual hero; a stentorian villain (Rasputin raised from the dead); cute animal sidekicks; …
The feature debut of music-video and television-ad director Spike Jonze concerns a sidewalk puppeteer (John Cusack, looking as scraggly as Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo), whose explicitly erotic production of Abelard and Heloise earns him repeated punches in the mouth, and whose wife populates their apartment with a diapered chimp and …
Youth comedy, slightly loonier than most: teenage suicide as a running gag, anthropomorphized hamburger buns, a Living Dead horde of paperboys. And, with a couple of direct lifts from Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, loftier in artistic aspirations, too. But no funnier, for all that. And there is still the …
Woody Allen's continued exploration of his beloved New York: the mythical past of Roaring Twenties speakeasies, the Broadway of Ziegfeld and O'Neill, the chorus girls, the Lost Generation café intellectuals, all that. New territory, for him. Once over lightly. For all its frothiness, though, it nonetheless gnaws on the Big …
In an inexplicable street-corner shootout between a cop and a probationer, a stray bullet hits a six-year-old child and (in a poetic turn of phrase) it keeps travelling -- up and up through the New York City power structure. A foursome of wordy screenwriters -- Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, Nicholas …
At some level, inaccessible to the naked eye, this could be classified as a jailbreak thriller, but any family resemblance to the likes of Black Tuesday or The Concrete Jungle has been obliterated beneath the mask of spectacle -- the cosmetic surgery, the collagen injections, the earrings and nose studs, …
Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …
John Sayles dredges up the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and offers a swallowable explanation for it: the penny-pinching, plantation-master practices of team owner Charles Comiskey, inappropriately nicknamed "Commie." From this explanation, as laid out in the book by Eliot Asinof, it is easy to see what must have appealed …
A dud about the bomb. The top-secret doings at Los Alamos are understandably not understandable, and they seem to roll along without assistance while the actors coil for the next big polemical haymaker: "It's all about ass, isn't it? Ya kick it or ya lick it." The biggest wallop, however, …
Atavistic film noir adapted from one of Jim Thompson's posthumously fashionable spit-and-chewing-gum jobs. The adapters (Stephen Frears, director; Donald Westlake, writer) have done well to eliminate a shockingly sentimental streak in the book, but in doing so they have further downshifted an already driftless plot. And the intermittent digressive flashback, …
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 -- …
Cool-cat comedy centered around the owner of a used-records store called Championship Vinyl, his love life past and present, and his two nerdy clerks. The arcane shoptalk will perhaps be of interest to those who can decipher it, but it makes no noticeable effort to engage the outsider. The musical …
Steven Lisberger, whose first feature was the high-technology, low-humanity Tron, has herewith lowered the technology without appreciably heightening the humanity. John Cusack, bouncing back from a flunked chemistry exam, a missed plane, a stuck car, a storm at sea, a Third World prison cell, and finally impressing his girlfriend's father …