One of Clint Eastwood's please-himself projects, an adaptation of Peter Viertel's roman à clef about John Huston's private elephant hunt when he ought to have been preparing to shoot The African Queen instead. One might have had doubts beforehand about the laconic Mr. Eastwood's ability to imitate the loquacious Mr. …
Bowdlerization of the Glenn Savan novel. Our odd couple now are a well-bred, somewhat prissy widower and a heavy-drinking, heavy-laughing hamburger waitress, who come to a meeting of souls and of pelvic bones in a montage to a K.T. Oslin song. (He's twenty-seven, she's forty-three; he's Jewish, she's lapsed Catholic; …
The downside of an artist attracting a crowd is that he is tempted to start playing to it, and pretty soon his Unique Creative Vision gets broadened and coarsened and cheapened, and David Lynch starts looking like John Waters -- or making John Waters look like R.W. Fassbinder. Fitted in …
Stone-cold erotic chestnut about the mistrustful, wounded, possibly impotent man and the one and only woman who can "cure" him. The man in the equation, who's supposed to be dark and distant and complicated, is instead just Mickey Rourke, with a face like a smoked ham and a low-volume voice …
One had learned not to expect too much from Nicolas Roeg (Insignificance, Eureka, Aria...). One had not been prepared, quite, to expect a children's film. The hero-figure with whom that audience is supposed to identify is a bespectacled little orphan whose Norwegian grandmother has immersed in the lore of witches, …
The cinematic souping-up of Sandra Bernhard's one-woman stage show puts her in a format to do a lot of different things, but it doesn't quite put her in a certifiable movie. Ostensibly she has returned from New York to L.A. after the close of her one-woman show (invariably referred to …
The sequel to the unnumbered Young Guns of 1988 tells the version of the Billy the Kid legend that would (and did) attract the attention of the NBC-TV series Unsolved Mysteries, the version in which the Kid emerges from the desert in 1950 as an old codger calling himself Brushy …