A sort of stretched-out version of Hemingway's The Killers, but not stretched out by way of flashbacks, like earlier screen treatments of The Killers itself, but rather with present-tense delaying tactics. Two London thugs have to transport a police informer from his hideaway in Spain to his scheduled retribution in …
Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg rejoin forces, nineteen years later, for a fourth archaeological adventure. Ford, with his big-cat purr of a voice, remains an amiable fellow; and if he’s a bit jowlier beneath that crumpled face (like a wadded-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and mostly smoothed …
In form a thriller, this feels more like an endurance test: so far-fetched, so encoded, so self-indulgent, it’s not apt to stir much curiosity or hope of satisfaction. Yet even though the course of action — from Madrid to Seville to the Spanish hinterland, in the company of a stone-faced, …
Inauspicious directing debut of cameraman Janusz Kaminski (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan), a rudimentary Devil movie freighted with arty photography (desaturated colors, clouds of dust particles) and ponderous pacing. With Winona Ryder, Ben Chaplin, John Hurt, Elias Koteas, Philip Baker Hall, Alfre Woodard.
British literary light Giles De'Ath -- "Dr. Death" to the chipper delivery boy at his front door, "Erstwhile fogey, now cult" to the BBC program guide in its write-up of his guest appearance on a radio chat show -- takes an unaccustomed plunge into the cultural mainstream when he ventures …
At a swank European estate that is mainly a golf course, bored heiress Kirsten Dunst wanders, frets, bathes, and has sex in a sand trap (but not with her dull new groom). Her impish father (John Hurt) steals silver spoons. Kiefer Sutherland has tantrums, Charlotte Rampling is bitter, Charlotte Gainsbourg …
The true story (or half-true) of an American student's run-in with the indecipherable Turkish penal code is structured as a sort of gauntlet of indignities; and it adds up to a test of whether one feels more readily righteous than bored. The personality of the American student and petty drug …
Not all the dreariness of this true-life escape adventure can be attributed to the quality of life in East Germany. The arduousness of constructing a do-it-yourself hot-air balloon to hop over the Iron Curtain (and then, after an unsuccessful maiden flight, another, bigger one) must be hard to make interesting …
"In this world you have entered," remarks the CIA dirty trickster, "things are rarely as they seem." Indeed, sometimes in this world you have entered -- this world of Robert Ludlum spy fiction -- things are so far from what they seem that when they are revealed for what they …
Iron Age science fiction for the Neanderthal adolescent. A sensitive, soft-spoken, short-haired stranger from a strange land crashes his spaceship in the midst of the lusty, loud, long-haired Vikings (plus a feisty feminist pacifist warrior princess), and leads the hunt for a cartooned alien monster that passes in Old Norway …
This scrimping, barren, almost desolate independent film generates above-average interest and disappointment as the sophomore feature film of Richard Kwietniowski, following Love and Death on Long Island. John Hurt, so good as the ivory-tower homosexual in that film, tends rather to expose too much as a cutthroat Atlantic City casino …
Olfactory fable about an 18th-century freak of nature, "born with a talent that made him unique among mankind," namely the world's most sensitive nose, to go along with a yearning to recapture the aromatic essence of the young virgin he had once killed by accident -- even if, in order …
An Australian Western, or in other words not truly a Western, notwithstanding the Western iconography of six-shooters, horses, spear-chucking "savages," a fraternal gang of outlaws (Guy Pearce, Danny Huston), a bounty hunter (John Hurt out-hamming John Carradine), a ruthless land-taming lawman and his genteel wife (Ray Winstone, Emily Watson). Even …
The 18th-century Highland hero, in an intelligent, strikingly handsome representation. Not only is it set well geographically, in some of the planet's most glorious scenery, but it is also set well verbally, in a Well-Made Screenplay by Scotland's own Alan Sharp, crafty, witty, oftentimes bawdy: "Love is a dunghill, Betty, …
The Profumo sex-and-spy case that toppled the Tory Party in 1963, recounted here in a powdered-over image and in the straightforward narrative style of a TV movie-of-the-week -- your basic Christine: Portrait of a Government-Wrecker. So narrow and businesslike in approach that you almost have to wonder what all the …