Facetious Western travels through the familiar landscape of the genre, albeit with the figures in the landscape masked in inexplicable shade under bright sunshine and in mushy, brownish photography. It bypasses, meanwhile, the familiar moods, attitudes, emotions ("Amazing Grace" will get sung at a graveside, but only in jest), en …
Frieda Lee Mock's Oscar-winning documentary on the artist who, while still a student in architecture at Yale, won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and then weathered a heavy storm in order to collect on her prize. After covering that fascinating territory, the movie becomes a chronology of …
Streetwalker's fairy tale, down a somewhat different street from that of Pretty Woman, a quiet suburban one, into a ready-made family composed of an ecologically conscious widower and his prepubescent son. Grace Kelly is the working girl's avowed ideal ("She married a prince, and never grew old"), but seeing as …
Needless remake of one of Hollywood's abiding contributions to Yuletide sentiment. No new angle: no ambiguity, for example, as to the identity of the self-proclaimed Kris Kringle; no diminution of his powers in a Godless era. Only a change of company name (but not of address) from Macy's to the …
Gang life, and nothing but, in the barrio (Echo Park), with the focus for a change on the "homegirls." Plenty of documentary information in the bright-lit images; but stilted acting and writing; and an undercooked story garnished with a blabbedy-blah-blah narration by a rotating team of voices. Angel Aviles, Seidy …
Stagy, forced, crashingly unfunny farce, based on an unimported French film (trans., Santa Claus Is a Shit), in orbit around a suicide-prevention center on Christmas. Nora Ephron, the director and co-writer, has not abandoned all her interest in humankind, all her indulgence in Weltschmerz, but the contact is sporadic and …
The monkey's no trouble; is on the contrary as fun as your average barrelful. This capuchin, trained as a pickpocket and (excuse the expression) cat burglar, runs away from his nasty master (Harvey Keitel, with a kerchief on his head and a come-and-go gypsy accent) and attaches himself to a …
Mommy needed "some time away" -- three years, to be exact -- and she returns loonier than when she left, wanting to get back not just her three sons, but her newly affianced husband as well. Decent little chiller, despite an epidemic of glass-breaking, a literally cliffhanging finale, and a …
Not so much a title as an editorial. The movie itself makes a natural companion piece to Alan Rudolph's The Moderns: rubbing shoulders once more with the artistic titans of the Twenties, only now in New York instead of Paris. A core group of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, …
The directorial debut of P.J. Hogan, previously encountered as a producer on his wife's directorial debut, Proof. (Jocelyn Moorhouse herewith returns the favor, functioning as a producer on her husband's debut. ) But at that time he was going by the name of Paul Hogan, making for an unfortunate confusion …
Incest and child-molestation comedy from the Disney folks. (In the original version, it was from French folks, which helps to account for it.) Of course the sins against nature aren't actual; they're just part of the tall tale made up by a fourteen-year-old girl to impress an older boy on …
Very independent (i.e., underfunded) film by Eric Schaeffer and Donal Lardner Ward, about a duo of very independent filmmakers played by the selfsame Schaeffer and Ward. ("Based on a true story," avows the straight-faced subtitle.) Some certified professionals appear in bit parts: Martha Plimpton, Phoebe Cates, Casey Siemaszko, John Sayles, …
Elephantine fantasy-reality dance in which a true-life case in pre-war Japan seems to mirror the plot of a censored, unpublished novel by mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965). Then the writer puts pen again to paper, and puts his alter ego -- the fictional Detective Akechi -- on the case. Lots …
A parody of Brian De Palma's parody of Eisenstein in The Untouchables gets things off to a hopeful start. But it's only a dream, and Lt. Frank Drebin (ret.) soon wakes up, and then it's back to the grind: gags on the assembly line. With Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, Fred …