Woody Allen's excavation of the musical genre -- not the backstage variety, which is still extant and needs no excavation, but the average-people variety. He does not take naturally to the conventions of the genre. He takes academically to them. Philosophically to them. Archaeologically to them. And the butterscotch candy …
Mad-doctor stuff (or mad-med-student, rather) about laboratory-controlled beyond-and-back experiments, to unlock "the secret of death." (Death, we find, is pleasant enough, no more painful than a Stan Brakhage underground movie, till you have to confront past sins and think about atonement.) The medical school and hospital is altogether a pretty …
Is the cute guy in the apartment across the way a Mr. Right or a psycho killer? (Will four fashion-model roommates be any help in finding out?) Old-hat romantic comedy, with a splash of "gross-out humor" for modernity. It lives or dies on the personal appeal of its stars, a …
Star vehicle. More precisely, a bicycle built for two, and pedaled across two types of terrain, George Cukor's and Alfred Hitchcock's. To put it as dauntingly as possible: Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts, in the roles of rival reporters on a train-wreck story, are required to be Tracy and Hepburn …
A Pygmalion tale about a dirty-mouthed, drug-addicted, gang-enrolled Galatea who, after killing a cop, is drafted by a nebulous intelligence agency as a usefully malleable talent. Released back into society as a trained assassin, she embarks in her free time on a girlish romance with a grocery clerk, kept blissfully …
Tom Hanks cowrote, directed, and stars in this novel pleasantry about a 50-something, all-too-amiable employee of the month. Hanks’s title character is fired at the film’s outset for his lack of education, prompting him to enroll in community college. Enter Julia Roberts as a frustrated speech professor in the midst …
Can Jennifer Lopez be Pretty Womanized? The question does not ask whether she can be America's Sweetheart (which, owing to her career choices to date, and despite the cuteness of her giggle, her nose-scrunch, her accent, etc., seems very much out of the question), but rather whether she can have …
It's too late. Too late, that is, to overturn conclusively the long-held belief that no variation on the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, no matter how twisted and remote (Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, The Nutty Professor, even Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype), could ever fail entirely to resonate. Jekyll and Hyde ... …
Trifling crime comedy slash road movie which for some reason, out of the truckloads of scripts dumped at their individual doorsteps, captured the fancy of both Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. (Typical Roberts line, spoken to her abductor: "You know, you're a very sensitive person for a cold-blooded killer." Typical …
The semblance, the illusion, the mere shell of an historical-biographical-hagiographic epic, in a revolutionary vein that stretches, and twists, from Braveheart through Gandhi through Spartacus (just missing Che en route) through Viva Zapata through Juarez and through Abel Gance's Napoleon. A project, we have been assured, dear to the Celtic …
Tarsem Singh brings his flair for visual composition to the fairy tale genre, and the modesty of scale reins him in to good effect. But the star of this Snow White adaptation isn’t the scenery, nor the workaday comedy, nor even Snow White herself (an adorable Lilly Collins), even if …
Julia Roberts, her two-ton ego, and her tapering tusklike head, in the part of a "forward-thinker" who travels east from Oakland State to her dream job at Wellesley, there to impart Art History platitudes and feminist fundamentals to the future homemakers in the Class of '54, and to lock horns …
Director Jodie Foster’s latest is one long series of narrative gotchas masquerading as moral or intellectual sophistication before finally revealing that it offers nothing more than world-weary sentimentality. (I guess after you’ve gutted everything else — moral outrage, systemic corruption, media vampirism, basic human decency, the plight of the common …
The Australian director of Muriel's Wedding, P.J. Hogan, goes to Hollywood, and his jaunty approach to color, to fashion, to pop music (in Muriel's..., it was the Greatest Hits of ABBA; in My Best Friend's..., it's predominantly the canon of Burt Bacharach and Hal David), has survived the journey intact. …