A retarded romantic comedy -- er, romantic comedy for the retarded -- er, romantic comedy about the retarded, and yes, for them in a way, after all. Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi, playing a couple of self-motivated mental defectives who find one another among the mere mental indolents of Bay …
Broader re-do of the 1970 film of the same name. The glove-like fit of the material on Jack Lemmon, if not so much on Sandy Dennis, has been altered to suit the sketchier acting talents of Steve Martin and the newly stuffed and stiffened face of Goldie Hawn (beneath the …
Advertised as "the outrageous new comedy from the guys who made There's Something about Mary." Well, not exactly. True, it's based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Peter Farrelly, and he and brother Bobby worked on the script. But so did Michael Corrente (Federal Hill, American Buffalo), who then directed it. …
Brian Helgeland, who came to prominence as co-screenwriter of L.A. Confidential, has chosen for his directorial debut to do a rehash of John Boorman's Point Blank, though it is not so much warmed over as served straight from the freezer, with a thin decolorizing layer of frost on it. The …
Best buddies Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas are has-been boxers matched against one another as last-minute replacements on the undercard of a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. A nice idea, thrown away on the lowbrow. (Didn't the management of Mandalay Bay read the script before granting permission to film? …
A team of 18th-century highwaymen, routinely romanticized for the youth crowd. That doesn't rule out a cartload of grubby and gruesome detail. With Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, and Liv Tyler; directed by Jake Scott.
Crude piece of Japanese animation -- additionally subtitled Mewtwo Strikes Back, in reference to a laboratory clone of a "pocket monster" called Mew, but enhanced with psychic powers, world-domination plans, and elementary existential questions along the lines of "Why am I here? Who am I? What is my reason for …
The ace air-traffic controller of the Newark-JFK-LaGuardia triangle goes into a tailspin after the arrival of the "interesting" new guy from Arizona, half-Indian and half-cowboy -- not to mention the new guy's very young wife, a full-lipped, full-bosomed, tattooed lush. Some well-turned gags, and some pointed scrutiny of masculine rivalry, …
A plane crash brings together a husband and a wife whose respective wife and husband, seated side-by-side on the ill-fated plane, were cheating on them. The surviving wife (Kristin Scott-Thomas, very classy) is a politician, so she wants the secret kept a secret; but the surviving husband (Harrison Ford, with …
Omnibus film along the lines of Tales of Manhattan or The Yellow Rolls-Royce, only instead of a coat or a car, the linking thread is a 17th-century musical instrument, passing through many hands on its way to a present-day auction house. There is a degree of suspense about who will …
Open-admissions sex comedy, straight and gay (male and female), HIV positive and negative, white, black, brown. Diarrhetically talky and grimly unfunny, with a relentlessly unhelpful musical score (the "Hallelujah Chorus" at a moment of orgasm). Mitchell Anderson, Jennifer Tilly, Cynda Williams, Lori Petty, T.C. Carson, Billy Wirth, and Paul Winfield; …
A Civil War adventure set in the gray area of the Kansas-Missouri border, where there was (we learn anew) no official Confederate Army presence, only a guerrilla force of Cavalier-haired pro-South Bushwhackers to do battle against their opposite number, the abolitionist Jayhawkers. The historical time and place are inherently, which …
It starts off like an ill-informed parody of an art film (two miserable lovers trading accusations, in and out of their antiseptic white-on-white bedroom, all the day long), and it only really deviates when it crosses over cautiously, decorously, just a step or two, into the realm of hardcore pornography. …
The reunion of the stars and director of Pretty Woman (not to forget supporting actor Hector Elizondo) is a Nineties-style screwball comedy, tolerable to the degree that you can tolerate the two stars. For many, presumably, that will be highly. Julia Roberts's constant sending-out of signals in an effort to …
Semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film by the French-Canadian Léa Pool. In the first minute of action, the pubescent heroine dribbles a few drops of blood on the seashore rocks -- her first period, and a clarion warning of the perils and pitfalls of the coming-of-age film. But the girl, Karine Vanasse, proves …