The premise of a special society of teen runaways nesting on the rooftops of abandoned buildings on Manhattan's Lower East Side (specifically in such custom-renovated domiciles as a wooden water tower and a pigeon coop) shows some real imagination, over and above its primary intent to ensnare the youth audience. …
A choking dose of Sixties nostalgia. Two Vietnam-era draft evaders, incommunicado for twenty years in Central America, return home as modern-day Rip van Winkles, carrying Top Secret info about CIA intervention in the south, and catching up on things like acid rain, pollution, the hole in the ozone layer, AIDS, …
Young love and true -- like, totally and completely. The sentiment is somewhat undermined by the casting of John Cusack, who either is the world's most insincere person or else had the misfortune to be born with the world's most traitorous eyebrows. (His too-advanced age is no help, either.) And …
The Profumo sex-and-spy case that toppled the Tory Party in 1963, recounted here in a powdered-over image and in the straightforward narrative style of a TV movie-of-the-week -- your basic Christine: Portrait of a Government-Wrecker. So narrow and businesslike in approach that you almost have to wonder what all the …
You could overdose on irony before you get past the title -- written out in party-invitation script, inside a gold-ribbon border, on a background of what appears to be crumpled red wrapping paper but turns out to be an exterminator's tarp. If that doesn't do you in, the opening scene …
A sort of heterosexual sequel to Cruising. Not an actual sequel, only a sort of. Al Pacino, the New York cop who dolled himself up in black leather and haunted the gay bars in search of a serial killer, has now taken out a matching ad in New York Weekly …
Weekly sitcom material: something to do with a psychic private detective who can be any sort of psychic you want, a medium, a mind reader, a fortune teller, a telekinetic. Bronson Pinchot, John Larroquette, and the too-tight frames of director Joel Zwick keep it securely boxed up in Teevee Land. …
Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, back together again, trying to recapture some of that old magic (some of what old magic?) in a "concept" comedy about a blind man and a deaf man (and both borderline hysterics) pursued by cops and killers alike. It's all "hook" and nary a nibble. …
A personal and cathartic film by Alan Pakula (writer, director), who examines the subject of second marriages, and extracts something slick and fake (the marriage proposal in a Cupid costume, etc.). For all its Lelouchian free-form, it's methodical, slow, prosaic. And it pretty much drops the free-form before the halfway …
Ninety percent script (and ten percent clothes models out of a J. Crew catalogue), Steven Soderbergh's succès d'estime is no sort of triumph over its circumstances. It bears all the I.D. marks of a low-budget directorial debut. The sound is tinny and hollow. The lighting is blary. The image flow …
Director Susan Seidelman appears to have decided to put her own taste temporarily into a garment bag and to bring out something to appeal to the masses. That would certainly help to account for why the movie is so slavishly attentive to its two oddly matched stars (Meryl Streep, Roseanne …
The plight of the father of a little girl who's suddenly a big girl -- a familiar situation illustrated for easy recognition and impossible laughs. Perhaps one possible laugh: Catherine Hicks as a three-year girlfriend stunned by the sight of an engagement ring. With Tony Danza and Ami (daughter of …
The combination of writer and director (Willy Russell, Lewis Gilbert) is the same as for Educating Rita. And although the face is different (Pauline Collins's), the circumstance of an unknown screen actress who had created the role on stage is again the same. So is the general theme of an …
It comes from Wes Craven, so anything goes. The hither-and-yawn storyline encompasses a psychic high-school football star (why is it that this youth can't outrace a foot-dragging gimp?), a slasher with a hunting knife, a migratory soul on a Body Snatcher rampage, a sort of Demon of the Electrical Circuits …