Melanie Griffith reprises (more or less) her Working Girl role in a different setting: the breathy-voiced secretary who shows she's ready for bigger things, in this case spying on the Nazis in wartime Berlin. The "office" romance and espionage action are just so much women's-fiction air freshener. (Besides a secretary, …
Nudgingly cute, drippingly glib, eclectically derivative (direct address to the camera, voice-over interior monologues, section headings like "Have Fun Stay Single," "The Hourglass Syndrome," "Blues for a T-Shirt"), and coolly romantic comedy about the tenants of a singles apartment in Seattle. City and people are almost equally pretty, with the …
A flare-up of urban paranoia that spells out the chanciness of shopping for a roommate in the classifieds: you could wind up with one half of a set of twins, who holds herself responsible for the death in childhood of the other half, and who still seeks to find a …
Computer-written comedy about a Reno lounge singer who witnesses a mob murder and, while waiting for a court date, hides out in a Carmelite convent, whips the cacophonous choir into shape (giving a Christian twist to that girl-rock classic, "I Will Follow Him," as Kenneth Anger already did in Scorpio …
Uninteresting vampire variation, with an especially uninteresting vampire: a blond dimply dreamboat teen. They call themselves sleepwalkers, not vampires; they involuntarily shape-shift; they willfully turn invisible; they go in for mother-son incest; and their natural enemies are cats, from whom a single scratch can be fatal. (The abundant cats don't …
Happy-go-lucky espionage caper about a motley team of security experts (aging Sixties activist, conspiracy theorist, black man, blind man, young man) who are hired -- blackmailed, actually -- by generic Bad Guys to steal a little "black box" that contains a master key to every computer code in the U.S.A. …
Set in a flooded London of 2008, this presents a lower-tide variation on two of the milestones of British science fiction, John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes and J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. From them it gets its only worthwhile idea. From lesser sources it gets its post-apocalyptic gunslinger (calf-length slicker, …
Peter Hyams re-routes his pounding action style into a pounding comedy style, in a Faustian fantasy about a couch potato who's sucked up by his satellite dish and spat out into a Satanic cable system. This allows a lot of latitude for spoofs of contemporary television: game shows, professional wrestling, …
Sylvester Stallone Career Revival Plan "D": As long as he's become a laughingstock, he may as well make comedies (wear a diaper, get interrupted in the shower by his mother, act embarrassed about his baby pictures). He's game, not especially deft. Frank Tidy's photography, though adding no levity, is weirdly …
The admired and adored Gong Li, regular leading lady of Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern), here plays against her "legendary" good looks, indeed drops out of the World's Most Beautiful Woman Sweepstakes altogether, with her body bulked out in simulated pregnancy beneath a black-and-red-checked woolen …
Dolly Parton, hick from the sticks, is applying for a receptionist job at a Chicago radio station when, through mistaken identity, she is whisked onto the air as a call-in psychologist. (The psychologist for whom she is mistaken never does turn up.) The premise recalls the anybody-can-be-a-therapist idea of The …
The "stranger" is an undercover policewoman on a murder investigation; the "us" whom she's among are the Hasidim of New York City, and above all the "cute" Talmudic scholar who, we are told, "is to Jewish learning what Mozart was to music." Sparks inevitably fly. It might be convenient to …
A Cinderella tale, or an Ugly Duckling tale, or a some other fairy tale, set in the world of competitive ballroom dancing Down Under. In one way or another, the movie calls to mind most of the dance movies of the previous decade: Footloose, Dirty Dancing (especially that), Salsa, Forbidden …
The Leopold-Loeb thrill kill of 1924, recounted from the angle of sexuality (Wildean) and not at all philosophy (Nietzschean). And in low-grade black-and-white. And with quasi-experimental affectations. And by subprofessional actors. Bits of archive footage storm the screen like U.S. Marines. With Craig Chester and Daniel Schlachet; written, directed, edited …
Eric Rohmer kicks off a projected series of "Tales of the Four Seasons," an ambitious and optimistic undertaking for a man past seventy: one down, three to go. (In sheer numbers, it's not as ambitious as his series of "Moral Tales" or his series of "Comedies and Proverbs" -- six …