High-concept romantic comedy about a love-'em-and-leave-'em ladykiller, a marine-park veterinarian in Hawaii, who tumbles for a brain-damaged blonde who can retain no short-term memories since her year-ago car accident and who is doomed every day to relive the day of the accident with no knowledge of intervening days: a scoop …
Tall tale about a quartet of Honty Tonk Harlots, as the wanted posters describe them, on the run from Pinkerton detectives while simultaneously in pursuit of the outlaw gang that made off with their $12,000 nest egg. (In pursuit, more poetically, more American Dreamily, of a clean start at an …
Aside from Drew Barrymore’s Greenpeace activist, there’s not an unselfish, trustworthy character to be found in this well-intentioned “save the whales” tale. It’s a kid pic, so the screenwriters wisely (unknowingly?) never allow personality and emotion to get in the way of the overriding message. A cast of familiar faces …
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 …
The overhaul of the late-Seventies TV series is, in essence, M:I-2 plus T&A.; The Mission: Impossible element comes clear in the opening sequence when, by and by, the Steadicam gives up roving the aisles of an airborne jetliner and settles down in front of an African-garbed LL Cool J, who, …
What would probably like to be thought of as a big goof, or alternatively a big boner, must instead be regarded as a big botch. The bigger-headedness that results from the big hit of 2000 is not an attractive feature, and in truth none of the three Angels -- Drew …
An adaptation of the "unauthorized autobiography" of Chuck Barris, TV game-show producer -- The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, et al. -- and moonlighting CIA hit man. Says him. We meet the protagonist (played with maximum smarm and supreme sleaze by Sam Rockwell) holed up, Manson-haired, naked, close to catatonic, …
Dark comedy, photographically as much as temperamentally, about a disturbed adolescent (Jake Gyllenhaal of October Sky) who has an imaginary friend in a demonic bunny suit giving him mischief-making orders. (The bunny's end-of-the-world forecast, however, carries little weight when the action is set in the thick of Dukakis's run for …
By increasingly foul means, a yuppie couple attempt to root out their upstairs Neighbor-from-Hell, a wizened Irishwoman with a deceptive grandmotherly twinkle. Director Danny DeVito has been toiling too long in the same black-comic mine (Throw Momma from the Train, The War of the Roses, Matilda, Death to Smoochy), and …
Director Andy Tennant's application for membership in the Peter Pan Club. It purports to be the True Story of Cinderella, as told to the Brothers Grimm after publication of their own fanciful account, to "set the record straight." The teller (the imperious Jeanne Moreau) proclaims herself a direct descendant, with …
Rueful road movie, an American resetting of a Giuseppe Tornatore tearjerker, in which an ailing widower takes off cross-country in his all-brown wardrobe, New York to Chicago to Denver to Vegas, to visit individually the scattered adult children who can't make time to visit him collectively, uncovering lessons along the …
Woody Allen's excavation of the musical genre -- not the backstage variety, which is still extant and needs no excavation, but the average-people variety. He does not take naturally to the conventions of the genre. He takes academically to them. Philosophically to them. Archaeologically to them. And the butterscotch candy …
A men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus romantic comedy, a substantial subject and amply amusing. It tells you a lot about the film, though, that the gist of it may be summed up in the title of a pop-psych best seller. Our Martian man, a middle-school math teacher, is also (note the year: 2003) a …