There’s a gay, black BFF living down the hall, a suffocatingly adorable mom, a handsome Jewish doctor, the obligatory Hallmark greeting card romantic interlude (parasailing, anyone?), characters who break out into spontaneous sing-alongs, and Whoopi Goldberg as God. What separates this from all the other chick flicks out there? Colon …
Unutterably tedious comic proposition to do with a Wall Street hoax in which a female financial wiz, in order to get her independent investment firm over the hump and off the ground, invents a fictitious male partner -- one Robert Cutty, whose surname is stolen off a bottle of Scotch …
In burying her mother, small town pharmacist and 40-year-old spinster Ave Maria Mulligan (Ashley Judd), unearths a scandalous family secret. The brief documentary history of the titular Virginia town that opens novelist and first-time director Adriana Trigiani’s undoubting romantic comedy suggested something more than another serving of Fried Green Magnolias. …
A risky title for a movie, particularly for a dish of sentimental tripe about a peewee prestidigitator who has Whoopi Goldberg for a put-upon foster mom and Gerard Depardieu for an imaginary playmate. The playmate eventually expands his repertoire to imaginary dance partner, imaginary family therapist, imaginary educator, imaginary moralizer. …
Buddy film, feminine gender. Three dissimilar single women -- Jane, the black lesbian cabaret entertainer; Robin, the uptight HIV-positive white-bread yuppie; Holly, the abused pregnant white-trash coquette -- share a van driving westward. (Road-weary cinematic technique: a montage of fast-food and gas-station signs, cut to the beat of the pop …
Comedy thriller, although really not much of either, about a part-time cat burglar and rest-of-the-time bookseller who falls under suspicion of murder. The character is tailored so snugly to the personality of Whoopi Goldberg that it stops being a character anymore -- or actually never starts. Bobcat Goldthwait is not …
First announced under the title of An Alan Smithee Film, it then turned into an actual Alan Smithee film: Alan Smithee being the official Hollywood pseudonym of any director who, for any variety of reasons, has withdrawn his name from a project. Arthur Hiller (who appears in the outtakes at …
Go behind the scenes of the PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow, and learn the story of its host LeVar Burton, with an inside look at the challenges he and the show's creators faced in cultivating a love of reading through television. Featured in the documentary are Burton and show guest …
Soap opera with a Jamaican patois — that of the black housekeeper in a fractured, then broken, Baltimore home. The housekeeper herself, notwithstanding a deep dark secret, is too good to be true: supremely self-possessed, wryly patronizing, witty, wise, and Whoopi Goldberg. But the Only Child of the household (since …
Steven Spielberg's old-fashioned Prestige Picture, a literary adaptation of both a critical and a popular success, and one with tie-ins to both the black and feminist communities. These last connections give the director a chance finally to apply the universe-embracing ideals of Close Encounters and E.T., not just to imaginary …
A little girl, traumatized by her mother's death, comes out of her shell to nudge her father and their black housekeeper (jazz lovers both) into romance. The writer-director, Jessie Nelson, does a lot of nudging also, making double sure we know precisely how we're supposed to feel about everything and …
A swatch of TV-movie material given a big-screen sheen. Michelle Pfeiffer is cast as a Mother Discouraged whose three-year-old middle child disappears from the crowded lobby of the host hotel at her fifteen-year high-school reunion. Nine years later, after an unavailing nationwide search, a People Magazine cover story, and a …
Agreeably old-fashioned survival adventure, "inspired by a true story" as well as by a Japanese film inspired by the same story, about a team of Antarctic sled dogs who, after saving the life of a UCLA scientist in quest of "the first meteorite from the planet Mercury," are chained up …