The two-story house in the suburbs isn't big enough for both the high-strung beginning novelist and her retired father-in-law, a tai-chi master who has learned not one word of English in his month in the States. A very quiet culture clash, outside of a kitchen-wrecking rampage and a couple of …
A nonmovie from a Joseph Telushkin stage play from a Chaim Grade short story. Two estranged Jews, a devout rabbi and a dissenting writer, hash out their personal and philosophical differences in a Montreal park in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They talk about important matters, and they periodically move …
Child-abuse instruction smothered in sap: the story-time narration of Tom Hanks, the Wishing Spot, the Secret Hiding Cubbyhole Place, the Pinky Promise, the Anti-Monster Brew, the giant talking buffalo from dreamland (voice of Ben Johnson), and what's christened "the big idea" -- a homemade flying machine assembled from a little …
For a while we're on an illusion-and-reality merry-go-round, with cheap-trick dream scenes and imaginary evil twins and oh-by-the-way flashbacks. Once we're let off the merry-go-round the degree of reality doesn't increase. Director Brian De Palma has always been lax about improbabilities, and here writing his own script he is able …
A movie that probably owes its life to Jeffrey Dahmer. William Friedkin's cursory (and cheaply produced) mull-over of mass murder, the insanity defense, and capital punishment had sat on the shelf for four years (legal entanglements), until "interest" in the subject got reawakened. Back to beddy-bye now. With Michael Biehn, …
Brandon (son of Bruce) Lee, a disaffected veteran of Tiananmen Square and incidentally a virtuoso of the martial arts, gets caught in the crossfire of a drug war. He doesn't have his father's hilariously bad dubbing to help make this sort of thing partly bearable, but he does have hilarious …
The directorial (also auctorial) debut of Quentin Tarantino, a past actor with a small part here. (Initial impression of him: a bit of a showoff.) In its essentials, it's a conventional heist movie, and there is not a lot more to it than essentials: an ad hoc gang of jewel …
A gentle snore on the subject of two Montana brothers raised by a Presbyterian minister to reverence fly-fishing and God but fly-fishing more. Like the prior two movies that Robert Redford elected to direct and not to appear in -- Ordinary People and The Milagro Beanfield War -- this one …
Good vs. Evil, Cock vs. Owl, Day vs. Night, Rock-and-Roll vs. Classical (now, hold on!). Don Bluth's cartoon feature about a dog, cat, bird, and mouse who journey to the city to bring back a Presley-esque rooster to the flooded farm -- a messily eclectic heroic quest. Ear-chewing narration; eye-jabbing …
John Mackenzie's account of events leading up to the Jack Kennedy assassination from the obstructed point of view of Jack Ruby has many narrative virtues not shared by Oliver Stone's JFK: focus, cohesion, cogency, compactness, an enveloping ambience, not to mention the absence of an external publicity machine to drum …
The South African stage musical on student insurrection in Soweto: long way from Rodgers and Hart. Something is gained by placing it in the actual locale, but there isn't a plotline complex enough to fill it. And the infectious songs and dances -- total fantasy -- sit uneasily alongside the …
Martin Brest's remake -- loose, they say -- of a mid-Seventies Italian comedy. But seeing Al Pacino here in the starring role won't leave you wanting to see Vittorio Gassman or anyone else. And screenwriter Bo Goldman has transplanted the action so neatly into the American scene -- Thanksgiving weekend, …
Remedial lesson on tolerance: incognito Jew from a Pennsylvania steel town gets an athletic scholarship to a blue-blooded prep school, where everybody loves him until the football season ends and his secret comes out. Set in the 1950s for additional backwardness, and building toward a moral crisis of duncical simplicity, …
Woody Allen doing a takeoff on F.W. Murnau and the German Expressionists in general, with shades of the "white" horror of Dreyer's Vampyr, plus his more customary dashes of Bergman (a travelling circus with a Swedish-accented magician). The black-and-white photography by Carlo di Palma is highly (if also drily, academically, …
The setting is a town named Palukaville; the local radio station, K-LARD (yes, five letters), features an A.M. drive-time team of Loud and Obnoxious; the title character's girlfriend is a would-be professional bowler who pronounces r's as w's; the peepee, poop, and puke jokes make up a high percentage of …