Funny enough satire about that tragic juncture in American history where the glitz of “big room” Vegas illusionists was eclipsed by common street magicians. There's a moment where the title character, played by Steve Carell, encounters his childhood idol and inspiration, Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin), in a nursing home. Carrell …
Alumni from the "golden age" of Camp Tamakwa (hence the corn oil poured over the image) gather for a reunion at the behest of their now-gray counselor, Uncle Lou. They have fun, expose their inner selves, experience black-and-white flashbacks, work out their problems, pile on the baloney. The use of …
Alan Arkin is a finely tuned comic reactor, in a style that might be described as freeze-dried hysteria, but he is severely overtaxed in a ridiculous spy spoof that subjects him -- a Manhattan dentist, home and family in New Jersey -- to a harebrained CIA agent, an excess of …
Unmotivated remake of the 1979 spy spoof of the same name: the mild-mannered dentist who gets ensnared in the psychopathic cloak-and-daggery of his daughter's future father-in-law is no longer a dentist but a podiatrist (fun-NY), though the heavy-breathing espionage maneuvers are barely recognizable anymore as comedy. You might have thought …
Give Robin Williams credit for the courage (or the folly) of his convictions. He has already secured an Oscar (Best Supporting Actor for Good Will Hunting), yet he persists in throwing himself into tubs of humanist mush, doing his smile-turned-upside-down number, begging to be taken seriously. This one -- a …
Based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, and directed, like his Duddy Kravitz, by Ted Kotcheff: on the apparent principle that if lightning came close once, it might come closer next time. Instead it came further. For all the period production and powdery-smeary photography and leaps in time and place, …
Mawkish Neil Simon idea about an average Nice Guy, striving to rejuvenate his self-confidence with a middle-years extramarital fling. He gets nowhere fast, which could also be said of Alan Arkin in a role as monotonously strident as this. Sally Kellerman, Paula Prentiss, and Renee Taylor as prospective playmates all …
Too much of the melancholy that is supposed to be inspired by the extinction of the unicorns is inspired instead by the proliferation of Saturday-morning-TV-level animation. A triumph, of sorts, for reality. Scripted by Peter S. Beagle, from his own novel; co-directed by Arthur Rankin, Jr., and Jules Bass; with …
The feature debut of music-video veterans Jonathan Dayton and his wife Valerie Faris was put together on the "quirky" assembly line, a product of the thriving "quirky" industry. Dad (Greg Kinnear) is a would-be self-help guru, "would-be," that is, if anyone were buying his Nine-Step Refuse-to-Lose System. Sample pearl, in …
No you won’t. From Jessie Nelson, the man who brought us Stepmom, I Am Sam, and Fred Claus...need I go on? Staler than year-old rum cake and louder than June Squbb’s holiday sweater, Hollywood yet again ushers in the Christmas season with a dysfunctional family racing to get it together …
Let’s not forget Jenny. Marley is the rambunctious Labrador — “the world’s worst dog” — meant to tide Jenny over till she and Me (real-life newspaper columnist John Grogan) can make some babies. As it turns out, we follow the dog through the arrival of three children and a move …
Jon Hamm stars in this worked-over true story about a puffed-up, on-the-skids sports agent whose humbling necessitates giving birth to a Susan Boyle-inspired talent hunt for an Indian cricket bowler able to transition into an MLB pitcher. As live-action Disney sports comedies go, this makes for amenable if predictable summertime …
Another quietly offbeat project for actor-turned-director Keith Gordon (The Chocolate War, A Midnight Clear), a somber and somnolent treatment of the irony-laden Vonnegut novel about an American spy in wartime Germany, to outward appearances employed, where he can do more harm than good, as a Nazi radio propagandist who nightly …
The resurrection of the pratfall-prone Inspector Clouseau can hardly be judged a degradation of the original Blake Edwards film of the same name, seeing as how Edwards himself degraded it in the process of doing seven sequels, including a posthumous patchwork with the peerless Peter Sellers, a substitution of the …
The title alludes to the U.S. policy of "extraordinary rendition" (hatched under the Clinton administration, we're informed, just to dirty the hands on both sides of the aisle, but not abused until the Bush administration), which allows for terror suspects to be whisked away in secrecy, without due process, to …