Ridiculous heist-and-hostage thriller that requires the retirement-age Harrison Ford to shoulder altogether too much of the burden of heroics -- all of it, to be exact -- as much as Jean-Claude Van Damme shouldered at half the age. And this in the role of a family-man Seattle banker! Not an …
Somewhere there may be ten-year-olds or eight-year-olds or the intellectual equivalents thereof who can even now be pleasantly astounded by Alistair MacLean's tortuous plotting (or plodding). All others are in for a slow burn. With Robert Shaw, Edward Fox, Harrison Ford, Franco Nero, and Barbara Bach; directed by Guy Hamilton.
A low-flame suspense thriller that comes, by and by, to a pretty steady and sustained simmer. Polanski's main notion of tension is to have actors in the same frame standing at radically different distances from the camera, so that the visual plane is pushed inward, like a door ajar. (A …
Robert Aldrich would appear to be an odd candidate to direct a Gene Wilder vehicle about a pure-in-heart Polish rabbi on a westward trek to set up a synagogue in San Francisco in the 1850s. He handles the assignment with surprising seriousness, but with something less than sensitivity. The movie …
Big-screen treatment of the 1963-67 television series of the same name. The original was something special: existentialism for the masses; Swanson Frozen Kafka; an installment-plan Odyssey (or: The Longest Distance Between Two Points). And David Janssen, an actor of the narrowest range, had in Dr. Richard Kimble, innocent man on …
There is a big difference between making this sort of WWII romance in 1943 and making it in 1979, much bigger than simply the difference (big in itself) between, say, Tyrone Power and Joan Fontaine on the one hand, and Harrison Ford and Lesley-Anne Down on the other. It is …
Deplorable cop film from director Ron Shelton, doubly deplorable since it follows so close on the heels of his respectable cop film, Dark Blue. That one, of course, was accorded a delayed and a limited release and was attended by perhaps forty-two paying customers nationwide. This one, having learned its …
Gutsy call to open with the sound of a ticking clock. Because by this point, honey, maybe it is the years. While there are a bunch of things that make this final (pleasepleaseplease) installment of the Indiana Jones series not so much maddening as disappointing, the film's biggest sin is …
Harrison Ford returns as the aging archaeologist in the fifth installment of the longrunning franchise, which is directed by James Mangold.
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 …
The third Indiana Jones adventure, and more or less what you'd expect. Perhaps a little less, in that this is the most blithely comical of them, with the hero's father filling the bill of comic-relief character actor. Of course we hardly needed any added relief in what is already an …
The note of campiness, carried over from the previous Spielberg-Lucas collaboration, is sounded here first thing, and with full Bette Midleresque force: the Paramount logo fades into a bas-relief design on a Chinese gong (joke), and the camera moves over from that to the smoking mouth of a papier-mâché dragon …
Fact-based story of a near-miss nuclear disaster aboard a Soviet submarine in 1961. (A companion, of sorts, to Thirteen Days.) Full of Russian fatalism, isolationism, and hugger-muggerism, in addition to clenched muscles, sweat, and merciless music. A grind, but not unbearable. The only comic relief comes in the coda: the …
Boy kills girl and self, thus forcing their young daughters, Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse), to spend five years in a deserted cabin being raised by mom's ghost. The feral siblings are eventually captured and placed in the home of their father's twin brother (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his …
The hero is a character of substance -- or better, to avoid confusion, to say he is a "character" and not a "hero." Or to pursue the distinction: everything that happens in the story, not just the outcome, is a direct consequence of who and what he is: a Rube …