Before and after all else, this is simply a sequel, with some of the common symptoms of sequelitis: a swelling of the head, a puffing-up of the body, an overall putting-on of pounds. The critics' exaggeration of the original's modest charms can only have aggravated the situation. (The same director, …
A couple of infantile nitwits (the co-creators of TV's South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, a couple of infantile nitwits) invent a driveway hybrid of baseball and basketball -- but mostly basketball -- and it blossoms into a throwback professional sport, resurrecting the true "spirit of athletic competition." The …
A pet project of star and co-producer (and otherwise TV talk-show queen) Oprah Winfrey, an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel concerning a tangibly "haunted" black family in postbellum Ohio. The adjustment of former slaves to an unaccustomed state of freedom is untrampled territory in movies, and this one opens …
Would-be big hoot. A loud, obnoxious, sophomoric action spoof cum black comedy about a Maalox-gulping hitman (Mark Wahlberg) who has a deep psychological need for everyone to like him. Lou Diamond Phillips, as his disloyal confederate, manages to work himself up into a rabid lather, but it's a waste of …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
A Tommy O'Haver Trifle, truthfully self-described. Good-looking, colorful, bright romantic comedy about the lust of a homosexual photographer for his newly discovered straight model -- Pygaylion, if you will, and his Gaylatea. The gas runs out before the end, even with long stretches of low-speed coasting. Sean P. Hayes, a …
Emir Kusturica's dense, distended farce centered around Balkan gypsies, a train robbery, and a barnyard's population of geese, chicks, pigs, dogs, besides the titular felines. Lighter than Kusturica's Underground, but indigestible in proportion, nevertheless. Impressive, a little, in its consistent texture and tone.
The black-leather, kung-fu, one-man-army vampire-hunter out of Marvel Comics, outfitted with special guns, knives, needles, and samurai sword which Van Helsing knew nothing about. ("Crosses," explains the hero's personal weapons-maker, "don't do squat.") Wesley Snipes practically boogies his way through the action scenes; and the disintegrating bodies, exploding heads, etc., …
A for-want-of-anything-better-to-do movie. It at least serves as a reminder that John Landis made a good one once. Eighteen years earlier. His lack of inspiration here extends to the clodhopping parade of face shots, the paraphrasing and plagiarizing of the original, the employment of the Russian mafia as straw badmen, …
Brick-thick chunk of whimsy, from the children's books of Mary Norton, about a species of wee folk known as Borrowers, one family of whom infests the house of the Lenders in a rose-hued, time-warped fantasyland. The Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians coexist well enough in the same space until they are required …
An emotionally imprisoned ex-con, who took a phony fall to square his account with a bookie, now wants to even the score with the Buffalo Bills placekicker, Scott Wood, who missed the Super Bowl-winning field goal. (The real-life former Bills kicker, Scott Norwood, could not be altogether pleased with this …
Disney's second computer-animated feature, following Toy Story, and somewhat embarrassingly released two months after Antz, from arch-rival DreamWorks. There can be no question of outright copycattery. The movies were too close to neck-and-neck for that. But the mere coincidence of two computer-animated features set in an ant colony and centered …
Comedy without laughs. "Satire" might be the optimistically preferred word of the director, co-writer, and star, Warren Beatty, and he might want to add, for commercial as well as critical purposes, the immediate qualifier of "Capra-esque." (The presence of the name Frank Capra III in both the opening and the …