A newly widowed housewife, advancing toward middle age, hits the road, with her vocal twelve-year-old son in tow, in search of a future of some kind, hoping to make a go of it as the Alice Faye-style singer she dreamed of becoming in her childhood. (The passion for goldie-oldie songs …
The titular adjective reveals itself to be a definite understatement: our lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) oftentimes seems like a spy from the underworld, and a not very clever or cautious spy at that, who somehow has infiltrated the New York Police Department. He takes drugs the whole day through (albeit holding …
The mystery element, which doesn't claim our attention until very near the end, has to do with what really happened to Theresa Russell, who spends the length of the movie in a hospital emergency room having her stomach pumped, her throat perforated, her vagina sampled, etc., while we get bits …
Forced, flat follow-up to Get Shorty, crudely directed by F. Gary Gray and coarsely photographed by Jeffrey L. Kimball, moving its base of operations from the film industry to the music business. John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance an encore to their number in Pulp Fiction. The Rock, stretching himself, …
Scriptwriter and former film critic Paul Schrader's directing debut, a hot-under-the-blue-collar propagandrama about how the System contrives to divide and conquer the workers in the Detroit auto industry. (The manufacturers of Checker cabs, who opened their facilities to the filmmakers, are graciously absolved, in the acknowledgments, of any likeness to …
Amorphous, garrulous, largely improvised, largely sedentary companion piece to Smoke, centered again around the Brooklyn Cigar Co. (Harvey Keitel is the only returning big-name star, so you get to hear the word "Auggie" spoken aloud another thirty or forty times.) Co-directors Wayne Wang and Paul Auster should have quit while …
Romanticized Mexican madonna and child. Satirized Anglo housewives. Villainized lawmen. Existentialized hero. Tony Richardson's experience with British working-class dramas in the days of the Angry Young Men prepared him well for the bleak landscape -- both natural and industrial -- around El Paso, Texas, and he gets much mileage (or …
Or Robert Altman's absolutely unique and heroic enterprise of inimitable lustre. You can't get through the title and credits without wilting under the oppressive self-consciousness and self-congratulation of this debunking of an American hero (or this kicking of a dead horse). Altman's remedy for the anti-Indian attack of past Hollywood …
Siegel, that is -- the vain gangster, the "visionary" gangster, the lovesick gangster, the henpecked gangster, the moonstruck, the loony, the buggy gangster. He makes a wide-ranging acting portfolio for the narrowly talented Warren Beatty, but he never really comes into focus as a character. And the movie on the …
Basic, bare-bones crime film about a double-crossed jewel thief with a score to settle ("I'm my own police"). John Irvin's no-nonsense direction is a little short of style (the credits sequence -- grainy black-and-white imagery of the snaky lines of L.A. freeways -- raises false expectations), but it pushes the …
Spike Lee offers the prospect of a couple of new angles of interest. First is the open acknowledgment of his debt to, or kinship with, Martin Scorsese, who co-produced the movie, and whose frequent actor Harvey Keitel has a leading role in it, and whose two-time scriptwriter Richard Price authored …
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 …
An anomaly, maybe an antilogy: a Sylvester Stallone film for critics. Written and directed by James Mangold (of the low-budget independent Heavy), it is a Sidney Lumet-style expose of police misconduct, in which the action star sets out as a resigned sideline-sitter, an overweight wannabe cop, hampered with one bad …
Dull title. Duller movie. And that's despite a vocabulary that gravitates toward "rat-fuckin' cocksucker" and "fuckin' cunt motherfucker," and despite a Cassavetes aesthetic of raw raging emotion photographed in a closeup cinéma-verité style. Abel Ferrera, the director, would appear to be one of those eternal sophomores (or eternal Henry Millers) …
Simple-minded simplification of a wonderful Conrad tale about two officers in Napoleon's army who engage each other in a series of duels over a period of years. The duels are shot in a panicked manner that does not allow you to appreciate the action, and the rest of the scenes …