Amiable banalities about the forces interfering with the creation of true art -- egos, libidos, politics, unions -- on a Parisian opera company's production of Tannhauser. Niels Arestrup, a facial composite of Jon Voight, Nicol Williamson, and Bruno Ganz, is the "dedicated" Hungarian conductor, and Glenn Close (singing voice of …
James Leo Herlihy's appealing tale about a misguided Texas stud (Jon Voight) who travels to Manhattan in order to sell his body to deprived city women and who rapidly sinks into a gutter companionship with a greasy, gimpy scrounger (Dustin Hoffman). Except, on occasion, for Voight's performance, the movie is …
Uncomplicated but unlucid spy trickery, nominally based on the late-Sixties-into-early-Seventies TV show. The star-hyphen-producer, Tom Cruise, has transformed the teamwork concept, however, into more of a ball-hog concept. Even more tightly wound than usual -- with, after all, the fate of the free world on his shoulders -- Cruise has …
High-tech lynching fantasy. Sure, Keenen Ivory Wayans was poised to fire a bullet of ice into an industrialist targeted by his covert-ops unit, the Black Sheep. But it wasn't him who shot the First Lady instead. Now everyone in the vicinity is on his tail -- the LAPD, the FBI, …
Juvenile adventure yarn about a treasure hunt for the legendary booty of the Knights Templar, handed down to their natural successors, the Masons, and squirreled away by the American Founding Fathers, with clues to its whereabouts written in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence. The Jerry …
National disgrace: another overtaxed premise with an eye to a Franchise. ("This doesn't involve another treasure hunt, does it?") The honorable name of Gates has been implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and rather than finding this historically intriguing, the present-day Gateses find it personally insulting. Exoneration will lie …
Frederic Forsyth's paranoiac plot deserves a special Fritz Lang Citation for sniffing out a vast network of ex-S.S. officers who are shielded now by new identities and are placed so strategically in the New Germany as to be able to squelch any investigation into their activities and also to be …
WWII history according to Michael Bay (Armageddon, The Rock), a three-hour lesson. To some extent the seriousness of the subject -- as contrasted to the director's previous subjects of the end of the world and the mere annihilation of San Francisco -- seems to have inspired Bay to sit up …
Another in the line of adaptations of John Grisham's dragon-slaying fairy tales for the morally complacent and self-congratulatory. In this one there are actually two dragons. Number one is a scamming insurance company that preys on the poor and dispatches a battalion of nattily attired attorneys against the idealistic young …
Told through the voice of Viktor Petrovich, a former KGB agent's life becomes inextricably linked with Ronald Reagan's when Reagan first caught the Soviets’ attention as an actor in Hollywood. Directed by Sean McNamara, starring Dennis Quaid, Jon Voight, Penelope Ann Miller, Mena Suvari, Lesley-Anne Down, David Henrie, and Kevin …
The moviemakers' unwillingness to anchor their story to a particular time and place imbues it with a quality of generalization, vagueness, and timidity rather than, as intended, universality. (The timidity is nowhere better seen than in the freeze-frame, will-he-or-won't-he ending.) In their detachment, though, the moviemakers at least save themselves …
Big gulp of castor oil: John Singleton's re-enactment of the torching of a black community, and massacre of its citizens, in Florida in the Twenties. Simple in presentation; graphic; grueling; dramatically crude. But it makes its point. Over and over. Only Jon Voight, in a truly tortured performance as the …
Do you ever feel as if life were an express train and there was no one at the throttle and the brake shoes had burned off? And as if you had just spent three years in solitary confinement and had slogged through a sewer in order to escape, and it …
Another 9/11, year of 1857, to be exact. A dark chapter in American history (the Mountain Meadows Massacre), written with hammer and chisel. Taking up the bulk of time, however, is a tale of Young Love at First Sight (a Mormon Romeo, a Gentile Juliet), written with blueberry syrup. Trent …
Restrained tearjerker: restrained in that it doesn't work too hard at jerking tears (come what tears may). It works hard at other things, though. It thoroughly, for example, scouts out the people, activities, and amenities aboard a luxury Mediterranean cruise liner (the sightseeing stops are more perfunctory: the Roman Coliseum, …