Teen comedy for grownups, but not for squares, about an assortment of oddballs caroming off one another, never fitting together flush, at an exclusive private school called Rushmore Academy. The central oddball will not remain at the school for the duration, starting out on "sudden-death academic probation," frittering away far …
Lead-balloon comedy of mistaken identity. A struggling (and losing badly) Simon-and-Garfunkel-ish singing duo, in matching short-sleeve checked shirts and sleeveless V-necked red pullovers, is misidentified as a crackerjack safecracking team and framed by a Jewish mafioso into doing his bidding: knock over three safes of his choosing in one week …
It would be easy enough, if insufficient, to say what's unusual about Alain Resnais's fourteenth feature. Just this: that the characters, in openly acknowledged hommage to British screenwriter Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, most pertinently), will periodically lip-sync to fragments of French pop songs from a …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …
A sophisticated and well-to-do Parisienne, daughter of an academic who specialized in the subject of "pain," is drawn to a much younger pretty-boy bisexual hustler, a penny-arcade and workout-gym type of guy. She's drawn to him to the extent of writing out a check for 35,000 francs, no questions asked, …
It makes a nice story, that Susanna Styron has transferred to the screen a short story by her father William, but it doesn't make such a nice movie — a groaningly stretched-out anecdote about a ninety-nine-year-old former slave who returns to the farm in Old Virginny to die. Careful Depression-period …
Wouldn't it be fun to think that the Bard suffered from writer's block, that he received a shove from "Kit" Marlowe to get the old plot-ball rolling, that he stole lines from soap-box orators, that he was rewriting his deathless dialogue daily during rehearsals, that one of the actors in …
English trifle consisting of the rompish scams of a local-born techno-nerd and a smooth-talking dyslexic American. The two con men, Stuart Townsend and Dan Futterman, exude a cockiness and a nonchalance that make them hard to root for. And their pert and pixie-haired girl Friday, Kate Beckinsale, is too cute …
The siege in fact began months before the movie came out, with pre-emptive protests from the Arab-American community. The storyline of a series of Arab terrorist attacks resulting in the imposition of martial law in Brooklyn — though not until perhaps an hour and a quarter into the hour-and-three-quarters running …
Mark Steven Johnson's major reworking, and hence renaming, of the John Irving novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, about a seriously small boy (no constricting label on the order of midget or dwarf is ever applied) who believes himself predestined to become a big hero. This he ultimately does, albeit …
Three men on the trail of a fox in the snow come upon a crashed plane with a dead pilot and a duffel of $4.4 million in cash: "It's the American Dream in a gym bag." The cracks-in-the-ice sequence of events is involving enough on the what-happens-next level. And it …
Opposites stranded on a tropical island -- a battered and boozy pilot and a hip bag-of-bones journalist in an assortment of braless tops -- with only a boatload of pirates for company. (The hero is called Quinn or, in the regional French accent, "Queenie," in an apparent attempt to promote …
A peddler of dope and poetry on the streets of Washington, D.C., combines with an inspirational writing teacher for reformist uplift. Barely presentable independent film, jumpy, jiggly, scrappy, sloppy. The show-stopping exhibitions of the rapper's art are communicative only in the vaguest of ways. Subtitles might have helped. With Saul …
The ingenious idea of writer-director Peter Howitt is to follow the same set of characters down alternative divergent paths from a given pivotal moment. (Ingenious if not altogether original: cf. Alain Resnais's Smoking/No Smoking or Resnais's original source, the cycle of Alan Ayckbourn stage plays under the title of Intimate …