If Eddie Murphy could get away with playing a cop, maybe Whoopi Goldberg could get away with it too. A big if, and a definite maybe-not. She wears funny clothes, makes funny cracks (or would-be funny: "You know, guys like you are the reason abortion's legal"), punches people in the …
Accurately but laconically named, this beyond-the-grave love story doodles around much too long on being a before-the-grave love story, making sure that the pertinent couple will be seen as nothing less than the Perfect Couple, admirable, enviable, unimprovable. (The thinking seems to be that one of them dying and then …
Pious run-through of the third -- and finally successful -- prosecution of the white-supremacist assassin of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, thirty years after the crime. Director Rob Reiner likes to have his points spoken out loud, and though the speech is quieter here than usual (A Few Good Men, The …
The title is taken from the prefatory narration of a one-time mental patient diagnosed with an ill-defined Borderline Personality Disorder: "Maybe I was crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted." Kinship with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has been intimated, but …
Flimsy feminine dream-weaving, backed by choruses of full-throated cheerleading, from the Terry McMillan novel. Angela Bassett, who starred also in the screen adaptation of the author's Waiting to Exhale, looks strong enough to have endured something more than the phony break-away obstacles thrown in her path as a Type A …
A British secret agent, marooned behind the Iron Curtain with no way out, taps into a computer at the Manhattan First National Bank in search of help. Fortunately for him, but not always for us, the operator of that other computer is Whoopi Goldberg. Much of the action requires her …
Graceless comedy about the gathering of the Slocumb family to put Daddy Bud in the ground. The funeral parlor is named Depew's, and the lisping pastor breaks wind in the middle of his oration -- just for instance. With LL Cool J, Vivica A. Fox, Jada Pinkett Smith, Anthony Anderson, …
The bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, 1955; or more exactly, a microscopic fragment of it: "Fifty thousand boycotted the buses in Montgomery. I knew one. Odessa Carter." For a while the movie pursues the plan of attack of another race-relations movie in another area of the globe in another era …
Artificial-insemination screw-up: a black high-school girl, breaking into the sperm-bank computer, discovers that her real father is not as requested ("black, smart, not too tall") but is instead a white man (worse, a car salesman modelled on Cal Worthington: cowboy duds, circus animals, everbody's buddy). Richard Benjamin directs with an …
A cartoonist in a coma, whence he descends to dreamland along with his fictional creation, Monkeybone, a simian symbol of the id; or more simply, the phallus; more precisely, an erect one. Fitfully sophisticated; mostly tedious and ugly (the sets, the animation, Monkeybone in particular); very rarely and very mildly …
Sister, stepmother, and neighbor form the support group around a sudden widow ("I just realized," she announces upon her return home from the hospital, "that now I am the 'W' word"), and the ensuing hen party is invaded but briefly by a solitary cock: rock star Jon Bon Jovi in …
Tyler Perry's first R-rated comedy stars Tika Sumpter, Tiffany Haddish, and Whoopi Goldberg.
Monotoned lip service to the joys of reading (more familiarity is shown with the screen treatments of Dr. Jekyll, Moby Dick, Treasure Island, than with the original books), in the form of a Neverending Story-type fantasy. Part live action, part animation, but not really much of either: less than an …
Robert Altman's addition to the Hollywood-on-Hollywood library certainly lifted his sagging reputation, though the reasons for its critical success may have had less to do with its intrinsic merits than with its usefulness as a discussion starter, a conversational ice-breaker. More like dam-breaker. It gave the critic an opening to …
Half a dozen Vegas vacationers are picked at random, for the private betting pleasure of high-rollers, to chase down the two million dollars in a locker in Silver City, New Mexico. Bargain-basement Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, sharing shelf space with Scavenger Hunt and Million Dollar Mystery. The opening credits …