A supposed "showcase" for a large ensemble of New Generation actors, not all of them as new as they need to be for their ten-year high-school reunion (in the dead of the Massachusetts winter!). Scott Rosenberg's glib, stilted, writerly dialogue -- to do with the ongoing growing pains at 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 …
Stephen King's Jekyll-and-Hyde variation is as convoluted and garbled as we have come to expect. A college Lit. professor and writer of "serious fiction" is threatened with the exposure of his pulp-novelist pseudonym. Why on earth — given the heritage of Kenneth Fearing, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, et al. — …
A tidy little small-scale low-budget thriller on an apocalyptic theme (same as Fail-Safe, same as Crimson Tide), a bout of nuclear brinkmanship -- or "Showdown in the Desert," as the cable news channel instantaneously christens it -- between the new leader of Iraq (Saddam's son) and the first Jewish U.S. …
Twenty-five years in the lives of the one-time "Gray Ghost" in the backfield of the LSU Sugar Bowl champs of 1955-56 and the same-time "Magnolia Queen," who subsequently married. Because the story is based on a novel by the eminent sportswriter Frank Deford, we might have hoped for a greater-than-usual …
Code names, those are, of two young Americans, one an amateur falconer and National Security employee, the other a drug dealer and user, who sell state secrets to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. John Schlesinger's version of Robert Lindsey's nonfiction best-seller provides adequate information on the how and the …
Fluffy stuff about a multiphobic American, most particularly Francophobic American, pursuing her errant fiancé to Paris and the Riviera, and falling in step with a French -- Franch -- Fr-r-rahnsh -- thief. A charming, mustachioed one, but of course. You can see immediately where it is headed, and Lawrence Kasdan …
Lurid whodunit, adapted from a Nelson DeMille potboiler, about a pulchritudinous Army psychologist who is found on the grounds of fictitious Fort McCallam, Ga., stripped bare, spread-eagled, lashed to four tent stakes, and apparently strangled. She happens also, if the foregoing is not inflammatory enough, to be the daughter of …
A literary hack (Ewan McGregor) — “You name it, he ghosts it” — lands the plum assignment of, for a cool quarter of a million, polishing up the memoirs of a Tony Blair-ish former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan), stepping into the shoes of the previous silent collaborator who has …
Tara Subkoff (All Over Me,The Cell) moves behind the camera to write and direct this based-on-true-events cult horror entry for IFC Midnight. After one of the zippiest title sequences in recent memory, six well-heeled twelve-year-old girls settle in for a sleepover in a mansion where “the vortex of the four …
Rip van Winkle multiplied by 2,000. And the product (to use the proper mathematical term) is a God damned Neanderthal,' preserved in the ice for 40,000 years and revivified by an Arctic research team violently divided on what to do with him. The situation is engrossing from the start, despite …
The old, old -- fifty-six-year-old, to be exact -- Alec Guinness vehicle retailored to the expansive personality and physique of Queen Latifah. As a mousy cookware clerk at a department store in New Orleans, given three weeks to live and determined to blow her bank account on a dream vacation …
Kid-friendly end-of-the-world science fiction (adult-tolerant) revolving around a Seattle brother and sister who find a toybox from the future, and inside it a flop-eared stuffed bunny by the name of Mimzy. The founder and studio head of New Line Cinema, Bob Shaye, trusted himself to direct his first film, and …
Terribly fey romantic fantasy by Alan Rudolph. The opening sequence apparently wants to plug in to the Capra-esque Forties, but, although Timothy Hutton makes a good likeness of Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart, the high-contrast black-and-white is too arty and artificial for total comfort. Then it's straight up to Heaven …