Steve Martin and Michael Caine take over the respective roles of Marlon Brando and David Niven in the 1964 flop, Bedtime Story: two con men preying on wealthy women on the Riviera. And they play them extremely broadly, to reassure the audience it's all in fun -- lethal in a …
Miserably paced thriller, not just because of the slowness and distension of every individual scene, but also because of the rhythm-and-rhymeless placement of the dramatic climaxes. The movie gets off on the wrong foot with a Dial Soap wet dream (Angie Dickinson steaming up the shower by fondling a body …
A Raoul Walsh-ian war film turned topsy-turvy so that the Nazis take over the Errol Flynn-Ronald Reagan roles. The story has to do with a typically humble Nazi scheme to kidnap Winston Churchill, and the hopelessness of the task adds some firm evidence of action director John Sturges's preoccupation with …
The determination of an unlettered, Liverpudlian hairdresser to storm the barricades of Higher Learning, through private tutorials with a burnt-out Scotch-addicted poet and against stiff opposition from her working-class husband, is sufficiently touching to overcome all dramatic short-cuts, greased wheels, and tail winds. The movie is more truthful about the …
Dad (Matthew Goode) might have used his surprise holiday as an excuse to reconcile with Mom. Instead, his son Ross (Teddie Malleson-Allen) is greeted at the lake house by her replacement parent (Paula Patton) and his surrogate siblings Maudie (Ellie-Mae Siame) and the smashingly appointed Smash (Ashley Aufderheide). Forced to …
Pierce Brosnan, having lost out to Timothy Dalton for the 007 role in The Living Daylights, had to console himself with this. It's the better movie, if that's any consolation. In it, he plays a KGB agent who's assembling an atom bomb in England, with a scheme to disgrace the …
Muscle-bound, knuckleheaded remake of the 1971 British film by Mike Hodges: an old story (mobster in search of answers in the mysterious death of his brother), muddily plotted and modishly styled, with an overdose of semi-hallucinatory visual tricks. Michael Caine, the original Carter, is on hand in a small role …
A Shakespearean herald reading the play’s old prologue is comically yanked at the beginning. So much for the literary roots, and despite mostly British accents, the wit leans to “Adios, loser,” “Let’s kick some grass,” and a “pansy” joke as garden gnomes fill out plastic remnants of the Romeo and …
The trailer housed 90% of the laughs spread thin throughout this remake of Martin Brest’s superb 1979 yarn about a trio of seniors who decide to knock over a bank. At least the producers didn’t scrimp in the casting department; Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin are perfect substitutes …
Austin Powers, a decent idea for a skit, was overextended in his first feature film, and every subsequent sequel can only extend the overkill. There is already, in just the second sequel, a "Twelve Days of Christmas" feeling of picking up baggage as we go. (Did we really need to …
By day, Sigourney Weaver is an underpaid researcher at the Institute for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies in London (with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a pair of designer eyeglasses to show for it); by night, an "escort girl" at the famous and infamous Jasmine Agency (and unbeknownst to her, a …
Hannah and Her Sisters runs an hour and forty-six minutes, rather long for a Woody Allen film, in fact the first of his films whose running time has stretched all the way to three figures. One might hope going into it that this would be a reflection of the larger …
If only for its proximity in time, this naturally calls to mind Gran Torino. But the vigilante-revenge plot brings it closer to a geriatric Death Wish, with a widowed pensioner in a London slum arming himself against Clockwork Orange ultra-violent youth and drawing on his training in the Royal Marines …