Teen movie with something extra: social pretentiousness. Happy Harry Hard-On is the handle of a basement radio broadcaster unbeknownst to his parents upstairs, a pair of laissez-faire liberals who've not forgotten the lessons of the Sixties. By day, he's a painfully shy, slouching, monosyllabic nonentity at Hubert H. Humphrey High …
I-Hate-New-York heist comedy: a smooth bank job followed by a bumpy escape route, which summarizes the reasons for wanting to leave the city at the same time as it throws up obstacles preventing it -- the raucous construction workers, the non-English-speaking cabbie, the punctilious bus driver (a movie-stealing portrayal by …
Plenty of scraps for the starving Western fan, from the table of Simon Wincer, the Australian director who had provided a near feast of such scraps (amid much bloatedness and waste) in the eight-hour TV miniseries, Lonesome Dove. The presence of a post-Civil-War American marksman in the Australian Outback feels …
A vampire film manqué about an eight-year-old boy in middle America in the middle 1950s who becomes convinced that the pallid English widow on the neighboring farm is a lamia. (Banish all thoughts of Fright Night: she may wear dark glasses to shield her eyes from the sun, she may …
Takeoff on the original Exorcist, in the never-say-die manner of Airplane! (Like Exorcist III, this one pretends number II never existed.) Paul Morrissey did this same thing better in his Hound of the Baskervilles, and didn't take up an entire movie doing it. Linda Blair is there to lend it …
The first feature-length sequel in the annals of Disney animation. The profusion of computer graphics no doubt gives the thing a diminished aura of heroism. And yet, the low-altitude, surface-skimming, simulated aerial shot across the Outback and into an open window is an exciting start. And the flight of the …
Retired jet pilot, who wants only to live the life of a beer commercial, tumbles into a tragic love triangle with a Mexican kingmaker and his much younger wife. Basic pulp-novel passion and torment, swathed in Tony Scott's patented visual goop, as if he were under the impression he was …
The Claus von Bulow case reopened, with no new reversal of verdict. That was hardly in the cards, since the movie was based on the book by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and human-rights activist who headed von Bulow's appeal and obtained a reversal of the original verdict. So, …
Obligatory nods are given toward the satirical and sentimental strains in the original, but the sequel concentrates on action and more action (special effects and more special effects). The most enjoyable part of it is that standard interlude in the life of any mythic hero, the wound, the illness, the …
It takes a certain courage to press onward toward a predictable blizzard of derision, and another sort of courage to alter the course sufficient degrees to give the slip to some of the faithful. After a behind-the-credits recap of the Moscow fight -- uproarious in its effect -- Stallone relocates …
Demonstrating that he still knows which side of his bread is buttered, Clint Eastwood wasted little time in following up the commercially chancy White Hunter, Black Heart with the commercially conservative The Rookie. Perhaps too little time. This old-cop-young-cop duet is a microwaved hash of reactionary reliables: xenophobia of Ian …
Tom Stoppard's scholarly jest (undergraduate-level), fleshing out two Shakespearean spear-carriers, reaches the screen a generation late, and demonstrates already that it lacks something of Hamlet's timelessness. Stoppard, directing the show himself, sets out to compensate for any dimmed cleverness by trying hard, harder, too hard -- beginning with the blues-and-howling-dog …
Spy thrillers, with their inherent interest in matters such as trust and betrayal, conform well to the interests of love stories. John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl, for example -- a better example by far than the present adaptation of his glasnost-era spy thriller, as grimly difficult to adapt …