Mark Steven Johnson's major reworking, and hence renaming, of the John Irving novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, about a seriously small boy (no constricting label on the order of midget or dwarf is ever applied) who believes himself predestined to become a big hero. This he ultimately does, albeit …
Droll stories, or droll vignettes, or droll sketches, of the walking wounded in the vicinity of a Brooklyn cigar store. Occasionally, at least once anyhow, something poignant occurs: a grieving widower, paging through the storekeeper's "conceptual" photo album of identically framed snapshots taken outside his shop at the same time …
Desperately cute romantic comedy revolving around an unlucky-in-love career girl (Ashley Judd: is she trying to be cute, too, when she twice pronounces "realtor" as "real-a-tor"?) who develops a "New Cow Theory," whereby men are posited to be like bulls in their boredom with prior sexual partners: "neophiliacs." The heedlessly …
The adaptation of the earliest and not least ambitious John Grisham potboiler, about a Mississippi black man on trial for the double murder of his ten-year-old daughter's rapists, bundles up the author's fairy-tale articles of faith (the luck of the beginner, the ascension of the underdog, the might of right) …
If Philip Kaufman has long been overrated (trace the blame to the identically initialed Pauline Kael), this cheesy feminist thriller, fully worthy of the Lifetime Channel, might remedy the problem all by itself. Though intriguing in its initial set-up and directed with care throughout, it takes a suicidal high dive …
Southern-fried chick flick. Seventeen-year-old Novalee Nation, westbound and pregnant, is superstitious about fives (her ma ran out on the fifth of the month; it took fifty-five stitches to close her steak-knife wound; etc.), so when the cashier at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart rings up her change at $5.55, she knows for …