Luc Besson, of La Femme Nikita and The Big Blue, finally comes to America in body besides spirit: to New York, in specific, for an action yarn, or yawn, about a milk-drinking, plant-nurturing, granny-sunglasses-wearing existential French hitman who initiates a barely pubescent orphan girl into the trade. The director's alienness …
Heart-on-sleeve reminiscence of the decades of a divided Berlin and most particularly a divided pair of sweethearts, one forced to do border-guard duty in the East ("Stop! Don't move or I'll shoot!"), the other free to toil for her fashion-designing aunt in the West. They are reunited in Prague in …
A title as self-conscious although not as accurate as Samuel Beckett's Film. Yes, Quentin Tarantino's cast of characters accommodates some staple figures of the form: the small-time heisters, the mob torpedoes, Mr. Big's sex-bomb mate, the boxer bribed to throw a fight. But the writer-director borrows his narrative devices from …
More extraterrestrial copycats: they not only copy the outward forms of earthlings, they also copy Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, things similar. More precisely, they are stingray-like parasites that attach themselves to human spinal columns: they don't really take the forms of earthlings; they take them over. Old …
Catholics against Protestants in 16th-century France. Holocaustically against them in a gruesomely detailed re-enactment of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the movie's too-early centerpiece. I.e., off-center centerpiece. The swollen-cheeked Isabelle Adjani, playing a woman half her age, and playing it through a veil of soft-focus photography, camps it up as …
Robert Redford's tardy exposé of the TV game-show scandals of the late Fifties has the common drawbacks of the docudrama. The drama, as such, is already well documented (foreknown, foregone), and, to the extent that it remains tied to the facts of the case, is perforce not terribly dramatic (formful, …
Throwback screwball comedy, set in the screwball heyday (1939), with corpses piling up backstage (subgenre of Murder at the Vanities and Lady of Burlesque) during the premiere of a new radio network, WBN. Fast-talking, fast-cutting, and fast-tiring. Any show of affection for an antiquated art form is trampled in the …
Or "The Navel of the World." Or Easter Island -- prior to European exploration in the 18th Century. Hollywoodized ethnography, with National Geographic nudity, on the Long Ears (i.e., lobes stretched like cookie dough) and the Short Ears (natural look), the Birdman, the First Egg, the Cave of the White …
Shooting in his habitual indolent zooms (and reverse zooms) and telephoto pans, through a half-blinding dust storm, Robert Altman here recycles the "critically acclaimed" formula of Nashville and The Player -- and, without the acclaim, The Wedding and Health -- in the different setting of Parisian haute couture: a herd …
Young love in and for the Nineties -- which apparently entails a preoccupation with the Seventies: TV reruns, goldie oldies, wall posters (Saturday Night Fever, Love Story), memorabilia (Charlie's Angels lunchbox). The script, about a one-for-all-and-all-for-one foursome of college grads, is riddled with observations on the level of "Evian is …
Last of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy of films named after the colors of the French flag (last as well, so he announced, of his entire career, unless he should discover the Jamaican flag). And insuffiently different from the preceding pair. Hyperintense, self-conscious, straining, arty. The new cast of characters, driven by …
Forbidden romance between master and menial in pre-Revolutionary China. A long snore interrupted intermittently by literal pyrotechnics. Last-minute laugh (unintended, or at any rate unprecedented): the unworthy suitor, at a "firecracker competition" to win the hand of the heroine, shoots rockets from the neighborhood of his crotch. With Wu Gang …
John Dahl's neo-noir thriller, a combustible compound of honest unemployed ex-Marine, professional hit man, unfaithful wife, and vengeful husband (Nicolas Cage, Dennis Hopper, Lara Flynn Boyle, and J.T. Walsh, respectively), is as much farce as thriller, and an air of cinemaniac hipness will have to stand in for the deeper …
Bah-humbug comedy from the Disney people, titillated perhaps by the kinds and amounts of profanity. A fugitive jewel thief, taking hostages as in Desperate Hours, gets caught in the crossfire of family squabbles on Christmas Eve. Abrasive all the way, and then suddenly and unconvincingly mushy at the end. With …
An unemployed Detroit ad man accepts a short-term position teaching English -- ultimately and primarily Hamlet -- at Fort McClane to an octet of boot-camp laggards (a.k.a., "squeakers," a.k.a., "double D's," i.e., "dumb as dogshit"). The classroom sessions, especially the early, feeling-out ones, are enjoyable in their patly written way. …