Homilizing coming-of-age tale revolving around a Vietnam vet in backwoods Mississippi, afflicted with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, prevented from holding a job, unafflicted with bitterness, unprevented from emanating sweetness and light. (Sort of a cross between Abe Lincoln and Jesus Christ, minus a beard.) His son, in a running feud with …
Human-spirit booster ("based on a true story," too) about being brave and chipper and witty and selfless in the face of a nameless crippling illness. Julie Walters as the afflicted wife, Jim Broadbent as her devoted husband, Thora Hird as his dotty mother, Sian Thomas as the blind novelist with …
Self-reflexive horror movie in which the director of the original Nightmare on Elm Street grapples with the monster that he unleashed ten years earlier, and that now has a life of its own. "I thought Wes stopped doing horror movies," observes Heather Langenkamp (as herself); she at least, now a …
The American way, the Hollywood way, the TV-movie-of-the-week way, to do a Problem Picture: if we are going to take on alcoholism, we are going to take it on to the exclusion of all else. It has got to be front and center and solo. The chief difference between the …
Number two of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy of films titled after the colors of the French flag. Each tale is independent of the others, notwithstanding minor points of intersection: the heroine of Blue, Juliette Binoche, pokes her head apologetically into a courtroom in White. This second one has to do with …
A tepid cup of Irish coffee, heavy on the whipped cream, but with a good stiff dose of Natasha Richardson. She, doing an expert American accent, proves again to be a gifted sophisticated comedienne, a far cry and a hard climb from Patty Hearst, not to mention a good long …
This French coming-of-homosexual-age tale ("I'm a faggot," repeated eight or nine times to the face in the bathroom mirror), against a distant backdrop of the Algerian War, is thoroughly serious, intelligent, tasteful, sensitive -- and unmemorable. Possibly a few recollectable moments of the honor guard in open-air repose (sprawling on …
Something of a Ninotchka for the Nineties. A very little something. Five Russian drinking buddies discover a magic portal to the West, open for a limited time only. Comically broad and visually drab, colored in shades of hot cereal awash in milk -- not just in dismal post-Communist Petersburg, but …
The only copy of a Harvard student's senior thesis is fumbled through a sidewalk grate and into the hands of a homeless man, who holds it hostage -- page by page -- in return for doughnuts, blankets, wine, whatever. The humble beginning gives you no hint of the heights of …
Werewolf movie, with airs. The careful, cautious, gradual progression -- into lycanthrope legend from a solid reality base of office politics, marital infidelity, and other mundanities -- carries with it the pretension of "specialness," of doing something never before done, of going somewhere never before gone. The movie behaves, with …
An old-fashioned soap opera of the type that can thrive only in a climate of social repression: in this case, Communist China. (Idle question: was it the Sexual Revolution that pushed American TV soap operas more and more toward crime dramas? And American movie soap operas more and more toward …
Sixteen-millimeter cheapie from Minneapolis, a gay romance that strives, under the inevitable cloud of AIDS, for some actual gaiety. (A V-neck-sweatered host/narrator leads the way, sitting atop a stool, holding a lollipop in one hand, and talking directly to the camera: "I mean, really, who has time for politics when …
True to its title, the approach of this three-hour-and-ten-minute Western is comprehensively biographical. And ploddingly, pacelessly, shapelessly, flabbily so. The spectator's heart is apt to sink right off the bat, when, after a pre-O.K. Corral teaser, he is sent back, as if for some remedial education, to meet the teenage …
Eddie Murphy had one. Richard Pryor had more than one. Now Martin Lawrence has one. A concert film. (On an underlit stage.) His unmodulated hoarse bellow makes for unpleasant listening, even aside from the content of it. (Brief summary: fuck, shit, dick, pussy, muh-fucker.) He's most amusing when just moving …
A musical-comedy lead balloon. The premise is this: Sir Richard Francis Burton, Victorian translator, explorer, sexologist, still alive in the late 20th Century, and employed as head taxidermist at the Toronto Natural History Museum, undertakes an exhibit for the Hall of Contagion on the Canadian flight attendant designated as Patient …