Will Smith's impression of the self-proclaimed "Greatest," Cassius Marcellus Clay. For entertainment purposes, it can't touch Billy Crystal's impression of him. (Though, for those same purposes, there can be no quibble with Jon Voight's Howard Cosell: a glued-on nose as phony as the hairpiece.) The two-and-a-half-hour skim through the prime …
Elementary (primitive, primeval) creature feature centered around a documentary film crew searching the Amazon for the People of the Mist, but first finding their reverenced reptile instead, thanks largely to a half-crazed, fully leering snake hunter (Jon Voight, having a ball) who is more hijacker than guide. The creature itself, …
Franco Zeffirelli's remake and update of King Vidor's 1931 tearjerker of the same name, with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder taking the places of Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, and mopping up, so to speak, on their elders. The characterization of the little boy is rather like a repressive, authoritarian …
The Marine Captain's wife, thinking to make herself useful while her man is away in Vietnam, takes a nonpaying job in the veterans' hospital. There, she undergoes a radical character change (symbolized by her going from straight hair to frizzy) and falls in love with a bitter wheelchair case who, …
Adapted from Friedrich Durrenmatt's philosophical detective novel, The Judge and His Hangman. The structural beauty of Durrenmatt's mousetrap holds its shape not nearly as well on the screen as on the page, and the tone has been drastically altered by the overstressed symbolism, the Fellini-esque oom-pah-pah musical score, some stray …
Going-through-the-motions paranoia thriller that goes through them like greased lightning. Plenty of high-tech whoosh and whirl, in other words, but no emotional impact. The governmental Goliaths, who want to institute a Surveillance Society (the inclusion of Gabriel Byrne and Loren Dean in the cast helps to call to mind Wim …
A blissfully unmarried couple (Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn) make the rounds, one day over the holidays, to the four households of their respective divorced parents. Any truth in the humor is buried in crudeness. The classy supporting cast (Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen, Jon Voight) proves to be an …
John Boorman's underworld drama in old-style black-and-white (Seamus Deasy, cinematographer), mustering a wide range of grays on a wide screen, with subtle gradations and occasional spots of harsh glare on the polished surface. The title figure is the real-life Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill (we learn to say it CAH-hill, …
Yet another Disney raid on the annals of sport for an Inspirational True Story: the 1966 NCAA basketball final in which the upstart Miners of Texas Western (today, UTEP) sent out five blacks for the opening tip against the "basketball royalty" of the all-white Kentucky Wildcats. This story, within a …
An ambitious, even overambitious, game of cops and robbers, fitted by rolling pin into the time-frame of Monday Night Football, a shade under three hours. Writer-director Michael Mann wants to have his opposing game players two opposite ways — as existential archetypes and as multi-dimensional humans — and the transitions …
Severely strained kiddie film adapted from a much-decorated novel by Louis Sachar. Three plotlines -- the origins of a hundred-fifty-year-old family curse in Latvia; interracial love, bigotry, and revenge in the Wild West; a juvenile hard-labor camp in present-day Texas -- keep interrupting one another and impeding momentum. The third …
These are the denizens of Max's Bar in Oakland, the crippled, the blind, the maimed, with nothing to hang on to but their dreams. And their story is a sort of Iceman Cometh warmed up and wearing sweatsocks. The moral of it seems to be that dreams are fine and …
The daughter of Sir Richard Croft inherits a sacred mission from her late father, who seems to have known when she was eight years old that she would grow up to be a militant extremist of Girl Power, and known too that she would discover the hidden clock and his …
A New York hustler, down ten thousand dollars to angry mobsters, takes his roommate, confidant, and conscience to Las Vegas to try to dig himself out of the hole. Not quite a character study -- it doesn't probe that deep; nothing more, really, than behavioral mimicry. And Jon Voight, who …
Jonathan Demme's ill-advised remake. The main point to be made about the 1962 original is that, with its historical co-ordinates of McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the Yellow Peril, it dates rather badly, and thus cries out for a major overhaul. But while the John Frankenheimer version — positing a …