This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
Namely Chicago, as of 1957, and as seen through the eyes of an Indiana country boy. The setting is permeated with the romance of the wild side -- hotels, bars, strip clubs, gyms, and the literal and figurative tumble of the dice -- and only slightly demystified by the rough-grained …
Starry-eyed science fiction, seemingly designed or destined to be blurbified into a "2001 for the Nineties" — complete with otherworldly light show and a solarized encounter with a Higher Intelligence. The very opening of the movie lays out the fictional terrain — light-years and light-years of it — as we …
Curiously cold occult thriller -- and not because of its wintry setting, which is an actual asset. "Curiously," because there is adequate attention paid to the peculiar burdens of clairvoyance, beginning with the pain of its acquisition and the accompanying loss of a fiancee and gain of a limp, chronic …
A late-blooming but God-gifted figure skater from Iowa begins her Cinderella climb toward the Winter Olympics (after one look at her new rival, the favored French champion is skidding all over the ice on belly and knees), and she gets as far as a Sports Illustrated cover before she is …
The accumulation of corpses and clues -- sexually unmolested young women with the blood neatly drained from their bodies, sloppily lipsticked and eyeshadowed faces, and a different cryptic word scrawled in blood at each crime scene -- might whet the appetite of the undiscriminating mystery addict. But the stridency of …
A retarded romantic comedy -- er, romantic comedy for the retarded -- er, romantic comedy about the retarded, and yes, for them in a way, after all. Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi, playing a couple of self-motivated mental defectives who find one another among the mere mental indolents of Bay …
Katt Shea Ruben's application to transfer from the cinematic gutter (Stripped to Kill, Stripped to Kill II) into the cinematic cellar: a bad-girl thriller about an adolescent sexual omnivore (Lolita tendencies, lesbian tendencies) with black-rooted bleached hair, a black leather jacket, a stick-on tattoo on her miniskirted thigh, a ring …
A new director labors under an old curse: Gary Sherman, who did the excellent Raw Meat and the less excellent but still good Dead and Buried. This series, however, is so set in its ways that it needs only a carpenter, not an architect. The most that Sherman can do …
A gentle snore on the subject of two Montana brothers raised by a Presbyterian minister to reverence fly-fishing and God but fly-fishing more. Like the prior two movies that Robert Redford elected to direct and not to appear in -- Ordinary People and The Milagro Beanfield War -- this one …
Navy commandos on a mission of mercy in darkest Nigeria: a two-faced action film that wants to salute the might of the American military at the same time as it wants to salute American individualism. (To say nothing -- and the less said the better -- of American conscience and …
Rudimentary Rangers-and-rustlers, modelled on Tombstone at least as far as the prefatory narration (James Coburn in place of Robert Mitchum), the opening slaughter of innocents by an outlaw band, and the Doc Holliday cough of the head Ranger (Dylan McDermott). The Holliday erudition, meanwhile, has been transferred to a green …