Bernardo Bertolucci combines a pamphleteer's penchant for straight, party-line ideology and a best-selling novelist's flair for wanton sensation: heaps of flesh, blood, and excrement (of both the literal and figurative sort). In its breadth, if not in its detail, this maxi-budgeted extravaganza could loosely be termed "novelistic." But just whose …
We already knew that Jay Ward's Rocky and His Friends was the hip kids' show of the Sixties. Now we know that screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan and director Des McAnuff knew it, too. But knowing it and being it are two different things. The mumbo-jumbo that permits the three inept villains …
The obligatory token of respect and appreciation for 1999's Analyze This. In a word, the sequel, likewise directed by Harold Ramis. The revised concept: the vulnerable mobster gets himself released from prison, and into the custody of his former therapist, by singing the entire score of West Side Story nonstop. …
One thing to be said for the comedies of Harold Ramis is that they always have a concept. The better ones (Groundhog Day, Multiplicity) have a more complicated one. The concept this time -- a Mafioso in therapy for anxiety -- is pretty simple, and the jokes pretty predictable. (Psychiatrist: …
Hard-boiled private-eye hokum, with a wire crossed into the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, resulting in a major power outage at the end, after getting by on dim bulbs till then. A black-garbed, bearded, be-ringed, pointed-fingernailed mystery man named Louis Cyphre (equals "Lucifer," get it?) hires a wisecracking Brooklyn gumshoe named Angel ("Of …
A dose of humanistic treacle to do with the temporary revival of catatonic patients through the experimental administration (this is in 1969) of the wonder drug L-DOPA. ("Dr. Sayer!" "What is it?" "It's a fuckin' miracle!") The plural of the title is not solely because there is more than one …
Some gorgeous images of fire, swirling and undulating with almost a shifting-sand, simmering-pot sort of subtlety. Also some standard fireball images of the kind you get when any One-Man Army launches a bazooka rocket into the opposition's ammo dump. And while the finale socks you with spectacular sights at approximately …
Robert De Niro unloads his gnarly, scowling, old-crank routine again as a self-deluded “genius,” sort of Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver as a nutty dirtball. His son (moon-eyed Paul Dano) dislikes him but helps him at a homeless shelter. Marginal in Paul Weitz’s moody, drifting film are Julianne Moore and …
The time-setting of this “Orwellian” (as we have all been instructed to call it) future is identified at the outset as “somewhere in the Twentieth Century,” and it is in fact both forward and backward from the present, laden with 1940s clothes and appliances, but further advanced into bureaucratic decadence …
Robert De Niro's directing debut -- a chance to dedicate a movie to the memory of his father, and immediately afterwards to give written thanks to songwriter Sammy Cahn. What else? To select golden oldies for a coming-of-age story set in the Sixties; to let a first-person narrator lay the …
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), …
Scorsese, doffing the ill-fitting penguin suit of The Age of Innocence, goes back to gangsters and to the scriptwriter of Good Fellas, Nicholas Pileggi. One major drawback here is the same drawback as there, only bigger (or rather, at three hours, longer): the brunt of the storytelling is entrusted to …
True-crime drama, about a New York cop with a father and son on the opposite side of the law, wears its heart on its sleeve and squeezes it like a sponge. Scottish-born director Michael Caton-Jones (best films: Rob Roy, Memphis Belle, old-fashioned stuff) doesn't let things get too messy. Excellent …
A copy of The Comeback Trail has been lounging on my hard drive for going on four months now. This week, temptation finally got the best of me. George Gallo rocketed out of the gate with such propulsion that his feet never touched down. He scripted Brian De Palma’s underrated …
Robert De Niro again, this time charging through the role of Jackie Burke, a once-mighty sitcom star who decades later has difficulty making the rent as a put-down comic. Any script with Roastmaster General Jeff Ross’s name attached can’t help but yield a few mean-spirited howls. (Included is a reenactment …