Courtroom drama, with all the freeze-dried flavor of a TV series pilot. A burnt-out radical lawyer of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies, who has since traded in his William Kunstler-ian clientele for a parade of mid-level drug peddlers, gets his liberal fires re-lit by an eight-year-old case of an apparent gang …
A small-town cop takes custody of the sole witness to a murder, a masterless mastiff. The man is a compulsive neatnik, and the dog is a frothing, drooling, farting, beer-drinking, furniture-eating slob -- and therein lies the joke, the whole and only joke. It took a committee of five scriptwriters …
The parents are called away on a family emergency, and they leave their sitcom brood in the care of that overgrown (and very fat) child, Uncle Buck. Should anything happen to Mom and Dad on route, a TV series looms as a grim possibility. John Candy has a funny few …
A dollop of Big Wednesday folk epic (the surfers' oral tradition) and a dash of West Side Story sociology (the Vals vs. the Lokes; i.e., Valley Boys vs. Locals). The filmmakers have some fun with indecipherable surf-ese; the viewer might have more of it with their concept of an epic …
A New York vampire story, with too much of New York -- psychiatrist's office, literary agency, art museum, singles bar, disco -- and too little of vampires. What little there is of the latter (a man, bitten on the neck by a casual pickup, takes to wearing dark glasses, drawing …
An anti-Anniversary Card from Danny DeVito, just as his Throw Momma from the Train was an anti-Mother's Day Card. The title gleefully foretells the scale of the hostilities. The heart, however, sinks a little at or near the outset, when we are sent via flashback to Square One: that rainy …
We have to get through some tired New York comedy, some tired first-date comedy, and some tired Mafia comedy, before we reach the main yawn of the evening: the dead body that won't stay down. It takes an unusually autocratic scriptwriter (Robert Klane) and an unusually compliant cast of characters …
The last movie, released posthumously, of Franklin J. Schaffner -- and about the best to be said for it is that it makes a better last movie than Yes, Giorgio or, a later one never really released at all, Lionheart. It lays out a truly vehement new metaphor for the …
Robert De Niro and Sean Penn go through the entire movie with the facial expressions of having a very bad smell in their nostrils. This must be their notion of comic acting. It can't be that they've got a premonitory whiff of the finished product. For one thing, De Niro …
Can a man and a woman (a woman whom the man finds attractive) just be friends without sex intervening? The initial hypothesis is "No," and it takes twelve-years-plus of screen time to fail to disprove it. A lot of sophisticated ideas, observations, and sitcom one-liners are gotten off the collective …
Echoing Edmund Wilson on a different detective story: who cares who's Harry Crumb? Since he's the detective on the case, however, this is a more serious absence of interest than not caring simply who the culprit is. He -- to go ahead and answer the question, anyway, in the face …
The Carolina back country, deep in the Depression. An outsider (a newly widowed clockmaker with a daughter and a pet pig) abandons his truck in midstream, and follows a plume of chimney smoke to a kind of Madonna of the Mountains (Kelly McGillis), who clearly patronizes a different hairdresser and …
A bio of John Belushi, based loosely on the book by Bob Woodward. Structurally it's a mess. It sometimes takes the approach of the deceased comedian guided through his life by a seraphic Puerto Rican cabbie; and sometimes it takes the approach of a suit-and-tie reporter (J.T. Walsh as Bob …