Lorenzo Carcaterra's best-selling revenge tale, obligingly but dubiously filed on the nonfiction bookshelves, of a quartet of Hell's Kitchen hellions who are sent together to the Wilkenson Home for Boys, are routinely beaten, tortured, and sexually abused by a quartet of Gestapo-esque guards, and then -- with The Count of …
Dizzying science-fiction extravaganza. The head-spinning sensation is caused in part by some hectic ER-type camerawork, and in part by some hard-to-read underwater sights, but for the most part by the gobbledegook in explanation of the origins of that submerged spacecraft, coated with three-hundred-years' worth of coral, and its strange cargo. …
Barry Levinson, taking surrealism and in particular the clouds and derby hats of Magritte as his passkey to the realm of the cutesy-wootsy and the silly-willy (talk about cultural decay!), attempts to become Tim Burton and at the same time remain the same warm-hearted, soft-headed liberal he has always been. …
Shoot-from-the-hip political satire about a cooked-up conflict with innocuous Albania in order to deflect attention, two weeks ahead of the election, from a Presidential sex scandal. We briefly hear, never clearly see, the President himself; the principal players are his damage-control trouble-shooter (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin …
Hollywood Semi-Confidential: a fictionalization of producer Art Linson’s chatty, catty tell-all. (The bearded, overweight Alec Baldwin, for example, becomes a bearded, overweight Bruce Willis, “as himself.”) The producer protagonist is curiously undercharacterized — though heftily embodied in Robert De Niro — and the fictionalizing renders the whole thing less personal …