Single-handedly, William Hurt damn near ruins the movie. Always a strange, always a mannered, always a tormented actor, he would appear here to be making a concerted effort to find out how close he can get to being the World's Worst Actor without sacrificing the good opinion of his fans …
Steven Spielberg's futuristic tale (a project taken over from the late Stanley Kubrick) of the first robot programmed to love. Not, let's be clear, one of those old-hat technological advances on the porn-shop inflatable love-doll, equipped with "sensuality simulators" and such. But rather, a "mecha-child" (short for mechanical child), placed …
The traditional mad scientist dressed up in new clothes, or rather, divested of his clothes and floating naked in an isolation tank. That's just for starters. It's quite nice the way the metaphysical odyssey of this so-called "Faust freak" keeps expanding into new territory, moving through a Dr. Leary psychedelic …
Much the same premise as Mary McCarthy's (or Sidney Lumet's) The Group: a circle of political idealists in their college days are reunited years later for the first funeral within the circle. But it is treated more in the form of The Return of the Secaucus Seven, a long shapeless …
Much the same premise as Mary McCarthy's (or Sidney Lumet's) The Group: a circle of political idealists in their college days are reunited years later for the first funeral within the circle. But it is treated more in the form of The Return of the Secaucus Seven, a long shapeless …
A comedy of varying shades of lightness, about a romantic triangle among the hard-driven workers on a network news team. Writer-director James L. Brooks often seems to draw on, and polish up, his previous work in series television. The anchorman who represents style over substance (William Hurt) is a realistic …
Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Affleck get into a fender-bender on the FDR on their separate ways to the courthouse, the one to divorce court, the other to probate court. The first, an operatically repentant alcoholic, unable to drive away from the scene of the accident, loses custody of his …
Strenuous uplift by way of Broadway (the Mark Medoff play), about a speech teacher of deaf eleventh-graders. We see little of the man's daily teaching techniques (and hear little of the sounds of deaf people's speech), only what the headmaster disapprovingly terms "razzle-dazzle": standing on his hands in the classroom, …
Dark, without a doubt, and dank, and steamy, and simultaneously futuristic and antiquated, and currently in the grip of pasty aliens who can reshape reality at will. (At the will of the scriptwriters, that is, not at their own.) An impressive production to a certain degree; an oppressive one to …
James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain star as an asshat and botched suicide, respectively, whose marriage fell apart with the death of their young son. Producer Harvey ‘Scissorhands’ Weinstein took first time writer-director Ned Benson’s dolorous trilogy — combined total running time of 311 minutes — and sliced them down to …
Espionage epic, reasonably described by one blurbist as "The Godfather of CIA movies," but only if you are satisfied to retain all the pretentiousness of The Godfather, right down to the oppressive underillumination, and do without any of the enlivening pyrotechnics. (Despite those subtractions, the movie still comes to within …
Three bodies have been found buried in the snow outside a Moscow skating rink; their faces and fingertips have been cut away. Who are they? Having got hold of our attention in the way of the classical detective story, the movie maintains its grip in the same way throughout. The …
Further unpleasantness from the always unpleasant David Cronenberg. Despite the pretentious-sounding title, this is in no sense an historical record of violence as a human fundamental (dating back, say, to Cain and Abel, or farther back to the appearance of the monolith among the apes in 2001), but merely a …