Another tasteful collaboration of director Barbet Schroeder and his faithful photographer Luciano Tovoli, working chiefly in cool blues and battleship grays, with a subtle spreading of shadows. The taste ends there. The project -- the only known bone-marrow match for a policeman's leukemic son is an incarcerated psychopath -- is …
Four mental patients get a pass to the ballgame. Translation: Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, Peter Boyle, and Stephen Furst get a pass to bad acting. With Lorraine Bracco; directed by Howard Zieff.
Second apolitical comedy in the same election year to deal with the wing-spreading of the President's only child, this girl heading west to college, in the footsteps of Chelsea Clinton, while her father campaigns for a second term. The film had the bad fortune to be beaten into the marketplace …
John Lee Hancock serves up a biopic of McDonald’s king Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton, just restrained enough as a ravenous dog in a human suit) that is not unlike the restaurant’s product: precisely prepared, brightly packaged (oh, that shot of the golden arches reflected in Kroc’s windshield as he pulls …
Andy Goodrich's (Michael Keaton) life is upended when his wife and mother of their nine-year-old twins enters a 90-day rehab program, leaving him on his own with their young kids. Thrust into the world of modern parenthood, Goodrich leans on his daughter from his first marriage, Grace (Mila Kunis), as …
In the previous movie by this name, the American attitude toward the Japanese (with Randolph Scott showing the way) favored annihilation. This one, forty-odd years later, about a Japanese takeover of an American auto plant, inclines toward compromise. Which is not to say that the face-off between Japanese regimentalism and …
The '63 Volkswagen Bug with a mind of its -- er, his -- own (also a libido of his own: antenna coming to full alert at the sight of a late-model cab-yellow Beetle) is reclaimed from Crazy Dave's Scrap and Salvage and spruced up for the NASCAR circuit. Insipid kiddie …
At first, and for the better part of its two and a half hours, this is apt to seem an oddly unadventurous undertaking for Quentin Tarantino, a gabby adaptation of a novel by his revered Elmore Leonard (source of notoriously mediocre movies), draggy, only fitfully funny, lifelessly staged, largely static. …
When a contract killer has a rapidly evolving form of dementia, he is offered an opportunity to redeem himself by saving the life of the adult son with whom he had been estranged. Starring Michael Keaton and Al Pacino.
Tim Burton oversees a lavish and garish horror comedy that captures the spirit of Halloween as deeply as, but no deeplier than, the Woolworth's costume department. Not for lack of expenditure. The best special effects that money can buy do not, however, come with any guarantee of charm -- one …
Shakespeare, naturally, and nearly as naturally, Branagh. As always with Shakespeare, even without Branagh, there is a period of adjustment. The opening recital of the "Hey Nonny, Nonny" lyric, with the widely spaced and overarticulated words spelled out on screen in almost a follow-the-bouncing-ball fashion, is meant to make the …
Light but weighty comedy-fantasy whose fruit-salady color conceals crunchy, protein-rich nutmeats. The premise is founded on something recognizably real: the shortage of time in the average day. The next step, really quite a leap, is mere expedience. Our harried construction executive pitches a fit in front of an altruistic geneticist …
Oh, man, I was totally ready to dismiss this one as Aaron Paul's deep downgrade in the costar department (Bryan Cranston swapped out for a Ford Mustang) until I got to Michael Keaton as 21st-century Car Talk host, saying that he could feel, "love, vengeance, and motor oil all swirling …
Hard-working but not very creative comedy about a prostitution ring operating out of the City Morgue. Ron Howard's direction, in only his second feature, starts out with a surge of unchanneled energy, but soon levels off, and later on summons up only an occasional flutter. Similarly, newcomer Michael Keaton lets …