Frugal and fact-based Canadian period production concerning the involvement of Walt Whitman as guru figure in the reform of an insane asylum in London, Ontario, and as feather-ruffler of the local dodos. It is quick to tut-tut over the obstinacy with which men of the 19th Century hold to the …
Family comedy with a bizarre plot hook about a dog-napping ring masterminded by an evil veterinarian (the benign Dean Jones behind coke-bottle lenses) for the purpose of testing lethal drugs, exploding bullets, and the like. (For whom? The CIA?) The hero is a big, slobbering Saint Bernard with superhuman, to …
What's this? Quarrelling already? You don't waste much time. That's a mouthful from the screenplay by Ingmar Bergman (directed by the Danish-born Bille August of Pelle the Conqueror) based on the courtship and early married life of his actual parents, a pious Lutheran pastor in a Godforsaken rural outpost and …
The running time is a minute or two shy of an hour and twenty, less a few more for the opening and closing credits. It would be nice to be able to say that this is the result of ruthless enforcement of the strictest creative standards. What can instead be …
On-the-run documentary about American paparazzi, mainly one Victor Malafronte, a conscienceless mercenary if there ever was. (Invasion of privacy? "I don't ever think about questions like that.") Sketchy and superficial, the movie itself stands not on the outside, but right in the thick, of the celebrity hunt: the motion-picture camera …
A political satire irretrievably misdirected from its basic premise: a thirty-something Right-wing folk singer, one of whose albums has climbed as high as #3 on the Billboard pop chart, who is running for one of the Pennsylvania senatorial seats on the monosyllabic slogan of "Pride." (The year is 1990.) If …
A romantic thriller of such ridiculousness that it could be difficult ever again to take seriously anyone connected with it. That would include Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the script, albeit seventeen (or was it nineteen?) years previous, which might partially absolve him if he were fifteen years old at the …
A romantic thriller of such ridiculousness that it could be difficult ever again to take seriously anyone connected with it. That would include Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the script, albeit seventeen (or was it nineteen?) years previous, which might partially absolve him if he were fifteen years old at the …
A true curiosity, up the alley of the professional psychologist more than of the casual moviegoer: a neo-Depression escapist romantic comedy about an affluent black Lothario who loves 'em and leaves 'em dangling, and who has the tables turned on him ("Call me?") and discovers the meaning of true love. …
Artificial respiration on 1930s slapstick, particularly the Marx Brothers, particularly A Night at the Opera. The patient -- the corpse -- surprisingly still has some life left in him ("You know The Great Volare?" "Ah, I knew him back when he was The Pretty Good Volare"). This is, above all …
A misnomer. Bram Stoker's Dracula, as we all are aware, is a book, and the film called Bram Stoker's Dracula does not concern itself with a man called Bram Stoker and his relationship to a book called Dracula. This is Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and no mistake. (Yes, it claims …
A misnomer. Bram Stoker's Dracula, as we all are aware, is a book, and the film called Bram Stoker's Dracula does not concern itself with a man called Bram Stoker and his relationship to a book called Dracula. This is Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and no mistake. (Yes, it claims …
Errol Morris ushers us into the world, or at least over its doorsill, of English cosmologist Stephen Hawking, stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) in his early twenties, losing the use of his body and eventually his voice, and now getting around in a motorized wheelchair and communicating …
True-crime documentary about a death in the family: one of four elderly illiterate bachelor brothers on a farm in central New York goes to bed one night, suffering from a variety of ailments, and never wakes up. Natural causes or mercy killing? The brother with whom he shared the bed …
What Bill and Ted did for time travel (i.e., less than nothing), Buffy does for vampire hunting. An airheaded high-school cheerleader, whose yellow-and-purple costume is neutralized by jaundiced cinematography, is the Chosen One to combat an infestation of bloodsuckers in Southern California. Mostly flat outside of Kristy Swanson's chest and …