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 …
A hot summer romance and a resulting child. But the mother had given her lover an incorrect address, and lost touch with him. Now it's five years later, and she has two new lovers. Yakety-yak-yak-yak-yak-yak. The second of Eric Rohmer's "Tales of the Four Seasons," and commendable mainly to devotees …
The directorial debut of writer Nora Ephron, a name that guarantees a level of sophistication, though not necessarily cinematic sophistication. And certainly with those Carly Simon melodies and lyrics ("I love Lucy and pumpernickel bread," "You're the love of my life./ You are the pleasure in pain," etc.) to help …
Formulaic murder mystery set against the "exotic" backdrop of the Oglala Sioux reservation in the Badlands, and drawing on the documentary realities (circa the 1970s) of Indian infighting and FBI intervention. We quickly recognize that we are being set up to sneer in general at the white man's -- and …
An historical imagining about the relationship between the French baroque composer and viol virtuoso Marin Marais -- worldly, ambitious, fame-seeking -- and his teacher M. de Sainte Colombe -- reclusive, ascetic, incorruptible. This is no Amadeus, however; both men are toweringly talented; they just take their talents in different directions, …
Barry Levinson, taking surrealism and in particular the clouds and derby hats of Magritte as his passkey to the realm of the cutesy-wootsy and the silly-willy (talk about cultural decay!), attempts to become Tim Burton and at the same time remain the same warm-hearted, soft-headed liberal he has always been. …
The gathering-up of clues and suspects in a poison-pen murder investigation in Palm Beach, Fla., is about as awkward and lurching and helter-skelter as you are ever apt to see in what is cavalierly referred to as a Major Motion Picture. (Battleship Potemkin is a major motion picture.) And the …
Walter Hill gets back to basics: your basic treasure hunt, your basic Mexican standoff, your basic moralizing and ironizing. Two Arkansas firemen, in the pursuit of their calling, come into possession of what appears to be a map to buried treasure, plus a yellowed news clipping that identifies said treasure …
Adult animated feature by Bill Plympton, but not very adult or very animated, about a fat-hipped, wheatfield-coiffed songwriter who, trying to meet a forty-seven-minute deadline, gets sidetracked in a fantasyland with the unfortunate name of Flooby Nooby. Some of the concepts are all right (a Laurel-and-Hardy tit-for-tat exchange between stolid …
Australian film about the Boat People, racial tensions in Malaysia, mother love, commitment, sacrifice -- big themes and nothing but. Stephen Wallace's floundering direction screams of being not quite up to it. Greta Scacchi and Joan Chen are the principal people let down. With Art Malik and Jack Thompson.
David Lynch really puts a lot into a dream scene, and if he ever had anything to put a dream scene into, he might really have something. What he has here instead is a far cry from a take-the-money-and-run bit of hack work. Obviously the big-screen resuscitation of his cancelled …
Steven Seagal in his familiar role of one-man-army, except in this instance it's one-man-Navy, an ex-SEAL demoted to ship's cook, aboard the U.S.S. Missouri when she's hijacked by turncoats. All suspense is ended as soon as you see that Seagal has cut off his ponytail for the role (what a …
Clint Eastwood, both star and director, retells the classic Western tale of the reformed bad man ("I ain't like that anymore" is a continual refrain) pulled back into the world he left behind. Final thrills notwithstanding, this is a slow and autumnal Western and not a dose of "revitalization," a …
Unisol, for short: the code name of one of the cyborgs resurrected from Vietnam casualties (top secret!). Two of them are now experiencing flashbacks to their past lives -- just like their forefather, Robocop -- and are growing unruly. The result is a chrestomathy of action clichés: the car hurtling …
Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused, Immediate Family) tries his hand at the "Highsmithian" thriller: the tale of the ordinary life that, through some chance event, outside intrusion, or internal gyroscopic wobble, soon begins to veer on an ever-widening course of aberration. In this case, too soon and too wide. In its …