Promising comic premise -- a swinging single San Diego newsman in the Seventies, and his personal attraction but professional resistance to a female colleague -- subjected to a strategy of anything-for-a-laugh: wild exaggeration, improbability, impossibility, fantasy, absurdity, ribaldry, animal abuse, cartoon interlude, musical numbers, celebrity cameos (Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, …
Computer nerd's wet dream. In it, he's a pint-sized pretty boy (Ryan Phillippe) with golden curls, a permanent pout, a beautiful blond girlfriend and a beautiful brunette colleague -- take your pick. He has been recruited right out of college by Portland's counterpart to Bill Gates ("Bill who?"), a mop-haired, …
Topical paranoia thriller about an expert in terrorism on the faculty of George Washington University, who comes to suspect that his smarmy new suburban neighbor with the Stepford wife and the Village-of-the-Damned daughter is himself a terrorist. That would be quite a coincidence if it were just a coincidence, but …
A political satire irretrievably misdirected from its basic premise: a thirty-something Right-wing folk singer, one of whose albums has climbed as high as #3 on the Billboard pop chart, who is running for one of the Pennsylvania senatorial seats on the monosyllabic slogan of "Pride." (The year is 1990.) If …
A baseball comedy about life in the lowly Carolina League. Some of the sidelong glances at ballpark ambience are perhaps (just about) enough to get on the good side of any fan of the sport. But scriptwriter and first-time director Ron Shelton doesn't do much to flesh out the various …
Robin Williams slightly (and strangely) constrained as a car salesman and womanizer: we don't see much of his technique in either pursuit, though we get a definite whiff of squalidness. Midway through, a Dog Day Afternoon-type "hostage situation" puts an end to all that, and also to all interest. A …
Sympathy for the terrorist. Not, heaven forbid, the Islamic terrorist, but the South African terrorist circa 1980, the hard-working family man who, falsely accused of terrorism, turns to terrorism for real. Parallels to other sorts of terrorists can be drawn all the same, and that would be the only avenue …
Post-apocalyptic children’s film, sufficiently dark for any full-bloom pessimist, about the remnants of humanity in a run-down underground city, and the two teenagers in search of an exit. Impressive physical production (Terry Gilliam at his greediest could not have asked for more), though the escape route gets a bit theme-parky. …
Ungadgety specimen of science fiction, set in a not too distant future, with primary locations in the Far East and the Middle East, when a global Big Brother keeps a close and censorious eye on human coupling and breeding. While neither very original nor skillful as storytelling, the vision of …
Paul Newman stars as an abused inmate who suffers from a failure to communicate. If you liked The Shawshank Redemption, well, I don't know how you'll feel about Cool Hand Luke, but they've got a few things in common, and Paul Newman is a helluva lot prettier than Tim Robbins.
Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …
A debate-forum movie, a chew-over of the topic of capital punishment, complete with de rigueur attention to the moment-by-moment minutiae of death-day prison procedure (frequent shots of the clock on the wall along the way). As seemingly dissimilar as it is from writer-director Tim Robbins's first effort -- the political …
Pythonization of Norse legend, not unlike the similar "-ization" of Anglo-Saxon legend in "Jabberwocky". Seasickness jokes and the like. Gray, grubby, and dull. With Tim Robbins, Mickey Rooney, John Cleese, Eartha Kitt, and Terry Jones; directed by Jones.
Another Tony Bill contemplation of violence and pacifism among the young (to go with My Bodyguard). But different. Very different. A sort of horror-comic vision of the Bronx in the Sixties, complete with a scarred Frankenstein's monster and an unconscious blonde in his arms. The interest of an Irish policeman's …
Cool-cat comedy centered around the owner of a used-records store called Championship Vinyl, his love life past and present, and his two nerdy clerks. The arcane shoptalk will perhaps be of interest to those who can decipher it, but it makes no noticeable effort to engage the outsider. The musical …