Basic, coarse James M. Cain material (the dissatisfied farm wife and the tall dark handyman -- and murder!), embellished with rural nostalgia, Southern Gothicness, feminist piety, and erotic goo. Lori Singer is more slumbrous than sultry. Anthony Edwards, Bruce Abbott; written and directed by Michie Gleason.
A lot of summer, not much of school. Or more exactly, a lot of anti-intellectualism (and pride in it), and not much of Remedial English. Director Carl Reiner, who appears in a tell-tale cameo role as a teacher who abandons his vocation the minute he wins the lottery, is old …
The Man of Steel, who had raised a hand against international terrorists in a prior installment, now deepens his political commitment by confiscating all nuclear weapons on the planet. Ah, but the nefarious Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) has manufactured just the monster to stop him: Nuclear-Man! The production and story …
An often contrived, but always solidly and ingeniously contrived, suspense thriller. There have been grumbles heard that its notice of the plights of the homeless and the handicapped and the Vietnam veteran (in this case, one and the same -- and on trial for murder to boot) is gratuitous or …
Spalding Gray, a performance artist with the delivery of a highly skilled snake-oil salesman, sits at a small wooden table, with microphone, notebook, and glass of water, and a couple of roll-down maps within arm's reach, and a cloudscape projected intermittently on a screen in the rear. And for an …
A junior congressional aide is tabbed to transport a U.S. Senator's troublesome daughter to a Southern reform school. But the girl's a teenager, after all, and the father's an adult, and a politician besides, so guess where your sympathy's supposed to go. The only thing out of line with all …
A remake, after an indecent delay of about a year, of Coline Serreau's 3 Men and a Cradle. A boon, maybe, for those to whom the presence of subtitles (and absence of the likes of Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg) was a barrier to enjoying, or even seeing, …
Comic reworking of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, and not as funny (among other things) as the straight one. Danny DeVito, who co-stars with Billy Crystal, comes up with some decent excuses for his debut as a director — especially some cheeky defiances of the laws of space and time …
The personal, not professional, feud between two competing aluminum-siding salesmen (Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito) starts out with Laurel-and-Hardy tit-for-tat attacks on each other's cars and escalates to wife-stealing (or wife-dumping, depending on the point of view). It is set in 1963, and in Baltimore, for no real purpose other than …
A serious movie about serious people, a seriously self-doubting priest and a seriously conscience-stricken sinner (a mistress and murderess), with a serious appearance by the Devil Himself, a serious bout of telepathy, a serious dabble in vampirism, a serious visitation by a ghost, and a serious miracle. This last is …
Kevin Costner comes off as a bit preppy, a bit wimpy, for the role of Treasury agent Eliot Ness. Maybe he's meant to start out that way, and then gain in stature, but all he gains instead is in number of low camera angles to give him an appearance of …
Screenwriter Mark Magill and director Jill Godmilow (Antonia: Portrait of a Woman) conjure up the summer of Gertrude Stein's mysterious and unmentionable illness in the nineteenth year of her relationship with her famous amanuensis, among other things, Alice B. Toklas. They roast marshmallows around the campfire with, among others, Guillaume …
British director Alex Cox gives us just enough glimpses of the hero amidst a blood-spurting Peckinpah-esque shootout in Mexico, or urging his horse across a cactus-studded Southwest landscape, to establish him in a mythic Western milieu and to make it clear that it's exactly that strain in the national character …