"From respected surgeon to mob doctor to FBI snitch" -- the story in the words of the protagonist. Aspirations toward the hip and the cool get only as close as the bogus. David Duchovny, Timothy Hutton, Angelina Jolie; directed by Andy Wilson.
Cheap-trick chiller from a Stephen King book. A Mississippi hick, an amusing John Turturro, shows up at the doorstep of a Stephen King-like popular author (Johnny Depp, playing a lot to the camera) to accuse him of plagiarism: "Ye-oo stowl mah stow-ry." Plagiarism as a subject might have been as …
Theater director Daniel Sullivan's re-staging of the Jon Robin Baitz play, still stagebound, about a Holocaust survivor and old established New York publisher (Ron Rifkin) who has no room for frivolity on his booklist. There's some fun in the character's unyieldingness, as well as in the particular titles he champions: …
John Sayles carves a large slice of sociology out of the Florida coast, similar in size to his slices in City of Hope and Lone Star. The blacks, the whites, the developers, the sticks-in-the-mud. Their dreams, their disillusionment, their desperation, their secrets, their scars, their villainy, their integrity, their humor …
Early on, there are enough eulogistic speeches, military formations, and regimented, geometrized compositions to produce goose flesh on anyone who retains a soft spot for John Ford, and to produce hives on anyone who doesn't. Quite soon, the view of military life becomes a bit more ambivalent than John Ford's. …
Short for Temp-from-Hell. But her boss has been in therapy for paranoia. Maybe he's imagining things again. Maybe it's only a coincidence that office co-workers are turning up dead. Maybe there's a reasonable explanation for everything. Maybe not. A laborious exercise in is-she-or-isn't-she, redeemed a little by Lara Flynn Boyle's …
Ah, the very title conjures up a fifty-year hit parade of big, bold, passionate (etc.) best-sellers. And for certain the original screenplay by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas has all the elements: all the horrors of family and the troubles of war; the suspense, the drama, the tragedy of a …
The Turgenev novel, put by Jerzy Skolimowski into pretty pictures, and lightly sprinkled with Polish drolleries. The United Nations cast (Timothy Hutton, William Forsythe, Valeria Golino, and Nastassja Kinski with Goldilocks curls) is not very convincing; and they, or we, are not made more comfortable by one of Skolimowski's typically …
A graffiti guerrilla undermines the New York mayor's "Polish the Big Apple" re-election campaign. He has justice, and the entire populace, on his side, too; and the chipper, Irish-accented background music tugs us back to the heyday of Ford, Capra, and McCarey. But the whole thing is a bit flat, …