After the pastoral interludes of The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, Walter Hill returns to the urban milieu of The Driver and The Warriors, but his decline since the latter pair continues nonetheless. One of the more obvious differences between them and the present work is the abandonment of an …
A legacy-of-abuse tragedy with heavy psychologizing and moralizing -- altogether as chilly as its upstate New Hampshire locale during deer-hunting season. It showcases ferociously fine work from Nick Nolte as the figurehead policeman of a sleepy small town, not unlike the Stallone character in Copland, who convinces himself that a …
Two far-apart married couples in Montreal, a middle-aged one composed of a randy handyman and a boozy former B-movie actress (Nick Nolte, Julie Christie) and a yuppie one composed of a sexually ambiguous workaholic and a child-craving housewife (Jonny Lee Miller, Lara Flynn Boyle), switch partners through the sheerest coincidence …
Walter Hill's thirteenth feature is also — oh, unhappy day! — his first sequel. A sequel, moreover, to the most negligible and not coincidentally most lucrative of his previous movies. The verbal and sometimes manual patty-cake of Nick Nolte's slobby cop and Eddie Murphy's spiffy con — Rumbles and Screechy …
Russell Brand plays the loveable drunk made profitably famous by Dudley Moore. Helen Mirren is his nanny, with a snarky crust that falls short of John Gielgud’s Hobson in the 1981 film. Brand lifts his voice to boyish, even girlish heights as the boozing playboy who seeks to avoid union …
Pretty, for sure, in Stuart Dryburgh's glossy photography. A parentless Vietnamese peasant, shunned in his picturesque village as "bui doi" ("less than dust," the term reserved for children of American fathers), tracks down his mother in the big city, where she works as a housemaid for an old crab who …
Worth seeing for the face-reddening, throat-constricting, vein-popping performance of Nick Nolte as a college basketball coach fashioned after Indiana U.'s Bobby Knight (who appears as himself in the climactic game, opposite Nolte on the sideline). At any rate he is fashioned after Knight up until he forges a Faustian pact …
A bullet rips through the heart of two studio logos, announcing the return of Walter Hill to the genre that brought him fame, the action comedy. Sylvester Stallone and Sung Kang perform a nifty reversal on the characters Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy played in Hill's 48 Hrs. With a …
Martin Scorsese's remake of a thing that was made well enough the first time, 1962. The director's appreciation of Hollywood Past can still be caught here in glimmers — mainly in the use of the stars of the original, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum (along with supporting player Martin Balsam), …
Radical nostalgia for a time when anti-war sentiment was working itself up to “the Second American Revolution.” (A long way from the current sentiment against the war in Iraq.) The Democratic National Convention of 1968 and the subsequent trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, et al., …
Set in Canada, Paris, London, San Francisco, and spoken in English, French, and Cantonese, this Olivier Assayas film contemplates the possibility of change in a person, and gives full, serious, unsentimental attention to the difficulty and uncertainty of such change. The person in question is "a junkie to the bone," …
"I can't afford to pass this up. It's an experience!" enthuses the sun-bleached jock to his fainthearted girlfriend, who only wishes to return home safely from her Bermuda holiday. The so-called experience is a Tom Swift-ian adventure involving sunken treasure, a giant moray eel, and voodoo villains. Its undeniable excitements …
Based loosely on Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, this is Paul Mazursky's second attempt at a transatlantic transplant (the first was Willie and Phil, from Truffaut's Jules and Jim) -- and better luck this time. In fact, better luck than the original. The anarchic vagabond and the bourgeois home he …
A private-eye case that pounds away at that old punching bag, City Hall corruption, but from a moralist's perspective, or an editorialist's, rather than a genre writer's. Because the writer is Arthur Miller (yes, that Arthur Miller), it pounds hard and relentlessly, without a lot of niftiness -- a sort …
An undercover Western by Walter Hill, with Vietnam vets doing duty as old-time cattle rustlers, train robbers, renegade Apaches, or whatever, and a white-suited drug kingpin standing in for the self-anointed south-of-the-border generalissimo, or neo-Confederate diehard, or United Indian Nations messiah. For all the heavy technologizing of the Western, what …