Adam Sandler bids to expand his range -- into niceness, romanticness, sweetness, dullness. (Actually, he had reached dullness before, but from another direction.) His bitterness over his broken heart permits him an occasional lapse, too, into more familiar Sandlerisms. There's a well-conceived screen moment when he misinterprets the mood of …
Just about as deep in goop as you can get. The initial steps are forewarningly soggy, traversing a love-at-first-sight and whirlwind courtship in the Alps, a wedding, the raising of two teenagers, and the attending of their double funeral, all before the end of the opening credits. The father follows …
Director Gregory Nava lingers a little longer on the musical biography shelf, slinging more mud than in Selena. There, he was under the watchful eye of the protagonist's survivors. And so here, the messy squabble over the estate of doo-wop pioneer Frankie Lymon -- touched off, it would seem, by …
First name, Oscar, here reduced to the role of martyr in a homosexual Passion play, the hapless plaintiff in an indictment of a benighted time. Up to and including his infamous libel trial, this is a conventional "biopic" (notwithstanding the breathtakingly unexpected opening in Colorado, with a rollicking Copland-esque musical …
The most essential addition to the Woody Allen filmography in the Nineties — a film not directed by Woody Allen. Taking its name from a Louis Armstrong tune, it chronicles the twenty-three-day, eighteen-city European tour of Allen as a member of a seven-piece jazz band — New Orleans traditional in …
Multiple-twist erotic thriller without the bare minimum of seriousness (the casting of Bill Murray as a Whiplash Willie shyster indicates a reluctance even to put up a front); more than the bare minimum, though, of salaciousness. The missing plot pieces are shuffled into the closing credits, for anyone who cares …
Robert Towne's "biopic" on middle-distance runner Steve Prefontaine was beaten to the finish line early in 1997 by Steve James's prosaically named Prefontaine, and it then fell back an extra year in the reasonable hope that the competing film would have been forgotten. Without question this later arrival is a …
Writer-director Pat Proft follows the spoof formula all the way to the jokes strewn through the closing credits: the single primary source of parody (The Fugitive), the brief side trips to secondary sources (Patriot Games, North by Northwest, Baywatch), the general creative atmosphere of forced labor. Leslie Nielsen, Richard Crenna, …
A between-seasons supplementary summer installment which, through its inflated scale and cost, calls into question the integrity and self-respect of the ongoing TV series. As on the small screen, David Duchovny's Mulder seems as awful as Gillian Anderson's Scully seems wonderful. The quest for the truth with this actor always …
Simple tale, and sentimental, and sad, of a good girl of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and her ill use by her superiors, while assigned to learn horseherding under the tutelage of Tibetan eunuch. Directed, with a real eye, by actress Joan Chen (The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks, etc.), the movie …
Neil LaBute's encore to In the Company of Men is not as infuriating, though provoking nevertheless. Provoking of calmer discussion, that is, in place of fury. This response would be entirely appropriate, since the principal subject under consideration is the inability of men and women to communicate. (Not just man …
Worthwhile remake and update of The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch comedy (antiquated even at the time) about two lonely-hearts pen pals who don't know that they already know and don't like each other. Nora Ephron, the director and co-writer along with her sister Delia, has neatly …
A would-be Sherlock Holmes for the Nineties: a junk-food junkie (fridge full of pop-top Tab), a substance abuser (Holmes had his occasional cocaine, remember), an untalented songwriter and guitar strummer (in place of a violin), a social recluse who never meets his clients face to face (employing a bemused Watson …