An "ordinary" man, moderately depressed about it, submits to an unskilled hypnotist for the sake of a party game ("What's the worst that can happen?"), and takes all too literally a posthypnotic suggestion to be more "open-minded." The 1958 Richard Matheson novel, with its ingenious blend of ingredients of science …
A concert movie and nothing more, and as narrowly focussed a one as ever was: little of the live audience, nothing of the backstage, only the on-stage. In fairness, the movie (directed by Jonathan Demme) is probably better to look at than most concert movies, and the concert (staged by …
Examination of a marriage made in, on, or from the Hollywood "A" list: Bruce Willis, Michelle Pfeiffer. (Combined body temperatures: eighty-nine-point-six degrees Fahrenheit.) The dialogue rings consistently false, or more accurately it rings, as director Rob Reiner tends to prefer it, with a consistent ba-da-bing, ba-da-bang, ba-da-boom. The action spans …
An oddity among oddities, a G-rated Disney film, in nice bright color, directed by David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, etc.). But notwithstanding its Midwestern corn and its heartland-on-the-sleeve, it turns out to have its fair share of Lynchian crotchets as well. This cuts both ways. The movie …
Aw-w-w-w-w-w. The computer-animated talking white mouse, in his high-top red sneakers and assorted outfits, is cute as all get-out, even if his computer program gives him a too-close resemblance to a Coca-Cola polar bear. The soft-sell absurdity of his adoption into a live-action human family (Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis …
Show-biz wannabes and has-beens ("They want me to play Christina Ricci's mother!") in present-day L.A., every one of them poked, jabbed, chopped, and skewered, with a very dull knife. Ally Sheedy, Rosanna Arquette, Michael Des Barres, John Doe, John Taylor, Beverly D'Angelo, Martin Kemp; co-written and co-directed by Allison Anders …
Spike Lee takes a wrong-end-of-the-telescope view of the Son-of-Sam murder spree during a New York City heat wave in 1977: the events in little. (In his introductory and closing remarks, newspaperman Jimmy Breslin witlessly parrots the catch phrase of TV's Naked City: "There are eight million stories in the Naked …
Writer-director Woody Allen here makes only token appearances on screen, as himself, in talking-head interview segments, together with jazz writer Nat Hentoff and others, to lend a documentary touch to the made-up story of Emmet Ray, a "little-known" American jazz guitarist of the Thirties ("I was a huge fan of …
Hollywood remake of the first of Patricia Highsmith's five Ripley novels, originally made in France, under the title Purple Noon, forty years earlier. (The remake is done in period: Chet Baker and Charlie Parker are the coolest, man.) Clearly, writer-director Anthony Minghella does not owe his inspiration to a desire …
Decidedly weak tea (and not so hot, either), with filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli holding forth from the head of the table as a rambling raconteur, remembering the days of his youth among the artsy English ladies of pre-war and mid-war Florence ("I've warmed both hands before the fires of Botticelli and …
A serious (and unsentimental) consideration of faith and the Omnipotent. Set in the late Seventies, when the Catholic Church required three miracles for sainthood in place of the new lowered standard of two, it tells of a grassroots campaign to canonize an immigrant Chicago woman, linked to good works in …
Respectable piece of science fiction, although coming so close on the heels of The Matrix and eXistenZ, it tends to show up the limits of the virtual-reality topic. The big ideas here, both of which can be found in one or the other of those predecessors, are that what we …
A self-described "lonely history teacher in Aurora, Illinois" heads to Ireland with his troubled teenage nephew to trace his roots. The resulting flashback, which doesn't get underway until somewhere after twenty minutes, is an affectionate, indulgent dawdle through Emerald Isle scenery, Catholic oppression (the fire-and-brimstone sermon from Stephen Rea as …