A comedy of family shame, rooted in the personal experience of filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and accordingly set in 1976. The premise is full of potential, even if some of that potential is down the lower road of a weekly TV sitcom. A single dad, old enough to be regularly mistaken …
Just to get our categories straight: this is not a fantasy about toys coming to life in the manner of March of the Wooden Soldiers, The Nutcracker, or of course, as the computer animation may prod you to think, Toy Story. It is a piece of science fiction on the …
Poky, talky, literary road movie, with frequent breaks for flashbacks, about two budding buddies from an Idaho Indian reservation who trek to Arizona to pick up the ashes of one of their fathers. It boasts of being the first Native American independent production, but it can boast of not a …
A three-unities drama (unity of time, place, action) about a political assassination and its immediate aftermath in a sealed-off Atlantic City casino. Brian De Palma, a director who believes his viewers should be able to see his direction, gives us here a great deal to look at, beginning at the …
An obsolete fighting man of the 21st Century, having distinguished himself in the War of the Six Cities, the Moscow Incident, the Battle of the Argentine Moons, etc., now proves his mettle against the new and improved and completely bald breed of replacements: one against twenty. Computer-brained action film programmed …
James Ivory's adaptation of the autobiographical roman à clef of Kaylie Jones, daughter of novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity), who in the course of the story returns with his family -- wife, daughter, and adopted son -- from his self-imposed exile in France in the Sixties and Seventies, …
The feature-film debut of writer-director Larry David, co-creator of TV's Seinfeld. Its jumping-off point provides a bona fide crisis of etiquette if not ethics: a couple of close cousins are playing side-by-side slot machines in Atlantic City when one of them, down to his last quarter, solicits two quarters from …
To put it in the most concrete terms possible, this is a tale of industrial espionage. But it would be difficult to continue very long to talk in concrete terms about a plot that revolves around a closely guarded secret known to us only as "the process." It's simply a …
It would be hard to improve upon the judgment of the returning Marg Helgenberger character at one of the spilled-guts crime scenes: "This is awful. This is just awful." Natasha Henstridge, thanks to the miracle of cloning, is able to return, too, though this time she mostly leaves it to …
Dizzying science-fiction extravaganza. The head-spinning sensation is caused in part by some hectic ER-type camerawork, and in part by some hard-to-read underwater sights, but for the most part by the gobbledegook in explanation of the origins of that submerged spacecraft, coated with three-hundred-years' worth of coral, and its strange cargo. …
The Spice Girls' introduction to the big screen, and a very poor introduction for anyone not already acquainted with them. (Would a Rip Van Winkle, viewing A Hard Day's Night for the first time, have any trouble telling which Beatle was which?) Their music, on the available evidence, consists of …
Or Star Trek: Insurrection. Or anyway the ninth installment in the Star Trek series. It sets up a clear-cut battle of beautiful Good against ugly Evil (Daniel Hugh Kelly, the leader of the good guys, bears a striking resemblance in looks and in manner to a younger William Shatner), and …
A real and common and fertile situation -- the battle between the Ex-Wife and the New Woman over the affections of two children of divorce -- but glossed and glamorized beyond all recognition. (In the case of the glowing cinematography of Donald McAlpine, not beyond all admiration.) Every day is …
Brian Gibson's comedy about the attempted comeback of a disbanded Seventies rock group known as Strange Fruit ("Pretty pointless reunion. Suppose I might get a shepherd's pie out of it?") mines the same kinds of laughs as This Is Spinal Tap, only a good deal fewer of them, and even …
Carlos Saura continues his remarkable series of musical films, shifting camp from his native Spain to Argentina, and swapping one musical tradition for another. (The man in charge of the music per se is the long-time Hollywood composer Lalo Schifrin, who we are apt to forget was born in Buenos …