Horny-teenager update at the end of the millennium. Four buddies form a pact to lose their virginity by prom night: "No longer will our penises be flaccid and unused!" Moments of tastelessness intrude on stretches of mere insipidness. Chris Klein and Natasha Lyonne can do better for themselves, and already …
Business mixed with pleasure: a breakneck project to paint several miles' worth of power-line pylons across the bleak Yorkshire landscape, and a romance between the foreman of the crew and a peregrinating, rock-climbing Aussie lass who hires on for pocket money. The camaraderie and conflict among the laborers (a strained …
One thing to be said for the comedies of Harold Ramis is that they always have a concept. The better ones (Groundhog Day, Multiplicity) have a more complicated one. The concept this time -- a Mafioso in therapy for anxiety -- is pretty simple, and the jokes pretty predictable. (Psychiatrist: …
Hardly a movie at all, more like a glossy picture-book supplement to Frank McCourt's best-selling memoir of growing up poor in Ireland. McCourt's prose has accordingly been whittled down to excerpted captions in service to the lavish illustrations. And very arty illustrations they are, too, predominantly in grim parsimonious gray-green …
Uncalled-for and uninspired retelling, without benefit of Yul Brynner or Broadway show tunes, of the clash of wits and wills between the Victorian-era widowed English governess and the progressive Siamese monarch-cum-polygamist. Jodie Foster has a painful-to-watch tenseness in her lips and jaw, perhaps under the strain of the British accent …
The second filmmaking venture of noted still photographer Larry Clark (the first was Kids), or in other words a second license not to hold the camera still. As before, the intended drift of the thing is to convince the comfortable, complacent moviegoer that he had no idea that reality could …
Oliver Stone's blitz of professional football. Long (almost three hours long, almost JFK and Nixon long), loud, hyperbolic, frenetic, chaotic, trite, cynical, sentimental, sanctimonious. And ill-informed. Stone seems to believe that a touchdown counts seven points; that playoff stats are added on to regular-season totals; that both sides in a …
One long string of banalities about the mortification of being a studious quiet high-school girl with a flighty brassy pushy mom. (Natalie Portman, Susan Sarandon, respectively.) The slums-of-Beverly-Hills milieu was better captured in The Slums of Beverly Hills, as was, for that matter, the feeling of adolescent mortification. The periodic …
Topical paranoia thriller about an expert in terrorism on the faculty of George Washington University, who comes to suspect that his smarmy new suburban neighbor with the Stepford wife and the Village-of-the-Damned daughter is himself a terrorist. That would be quite a coincidence if it were just a coincidence, but …
Is it another I Married a Monster from Outer Space, or is it only the paranoia of an expectant mother? The movie is too slow and ponderous for the one, and too hoked-up for the other, but it has a nice big fat role for Charlize Theron, who takes it …
Sappy but carefully crafted romance between the blind masseur of Bear Mountain Inn and Spa and a type-A architect from the Big Apple. Nice scene of experiencing a rainstorm from purely an audio perspective, and the experimental cataract surgery that confers sight on a well-adjusted blind man raises some interesting …
Mike Myers's one-joke comedy, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, is stretched into a sequel. And not only has the richest source of material already been pretty well tapped out -- the anachronism of a swinging Bondian superspy in the Nineties -- it is now also pretty well abandoned, with …
With this, the seventy-nine-year-old Eric Rohmer completes a cycle of four films begun a decade before, "Tales of the Four Seasons." What sets it apart from other Rohmers, what gets you to straighten up in your seat, is the greater generational mix in the cast of characters. There are still, …