Comic-book character brought to life: "the richest kid in the world," but still a kid at heart (likes baseball, needs friends), with a British manservant called Cadbury, a pet dog called Dollermatian (dollar signs in place of spots), and a philanthropist father who, while amassing $70 billion, has never had …
Something in the fashion of A River Runs through It, only with pace and plot. The essential situation is simple enough: a team of armed robbers, making their getaway down a turbulent Montana river, co-opts a vacationing family going the same direction. It also is complicated enough: the expert rafter …
A timely subject of satire -- diets, aerobics, colonics, the entire health racket -- but set at the turn of the century so as to broaden the targets. And at the same time inoffensively isolate them. Alan Parker, working from a novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, lends his always heavy …
A knowing, wallowing, winking film noir, post-David Lynch, post-Jennifer Lynch even, wherein extremity and excess pass for profundity. The crooked-cop hero (Gary Oldman: not quite so bad as the cop in Bad Lieutenant, more like merely a Bad Sergeant) narrates the tale in the third person -- an acceptable gimmick …
TV news bulletin: a terrorist bomb has blown up a Marine headquarters in the Sinai, where one of the seven Springer brothers is stationed. The other six of them rally round the Springer matriarch, together with one girlfriend and the estranged husband and father, to await the casualty report. The …
Santa Claus tumbles off the roof of Scott Calvin, and the latter inherits the suit, the sleigh, the job, a pair of pajamas (no need to change the monogram), a pot belly, etc. Facile holiday fare. A few slightly more inspired minutes at the outset, detailing a divorced dad's Christmas …
Sent for punishment into deepest Mexico, a New York Yankee baseball scout lives out a version of his most cherished myth, King Kong: going into the jungle and coming back to civilization with the Eighth Wonder of the World (in this case, a 100-plus-mile-an-hour fastball). Trouble is, the Wonder Boy …
John Waters brings his distinctive (alternative, subversive, authentically liberal) voice to bear on a constellation of topics close to his heart: true crime, the tabloid press, TV docudramas, instant celebrity, fandom, the whole indistinguishable blur. His own response to the pageant seems plain enough: irony overpowered by relish. Or better, …
Rudimentary interview-and-illustration documentary on the permissive "utopia" of contemporary Holland. Some good information, if you're after it, in bad sound and a bad (video-to-film) picture. Directed by Jonathan Blank.
Superhero fantasy about an Occidental opium lord in Tibet, rehabilitated by a fortune-cookie-talking monk ("The weed of crime bears bitter fruit"), and taught, among other things, the power to "cloud men's minds" (i.e., to turn invisible save for an inerasable shadow) as well as the power to express oneself in …
Three youthy and self-congratulatory Glaswegians, two men, one woman, to a cocktail-shaker beat in the background, subject prospective flatmates to a torturous inquisition (a variation on the standard "audition" montage), leaving viewers wondering why anyone would want to move in with them. (Not to mention into the eye-fatiguing confines of …
One of the worst titles to the left or right of the Robert Ludlum portion of the bookshelves. But then, the original title of the Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, belongs with When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy …
One of the worst titles to the left or right of the Robert Ludlum portion of the bookshelves. But then, the original title of the Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, belongs with When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy …
Faintly Resnaisian memory film from Tunisia: an eve-of-abortion revisitation of the heroine's childhood home and the site of her mother's sexual subjugation to the local pooh-bah. (Right-to-Lifers can relax: the visit changes the woman's mind, and the curtain line might even bring a feminist tear to the eye.) Now, Moufida …
Imitation Jonathan Kellerman murder mystery (original screenplay by Akiva Goldsman), with a child psychologist as the detective (Richard Dreyfuss, short enough to empathize fully with his patients) and an autistic eight-year-old as the witness to the crime. It's not a kind of detection the mystery fan can take much part …