Spike Lee, in confrontational mode, serves up a new generation's Putney Swope, the blaxploitation-era satire by Robert Downey (Jr.'s father) about a black takeover of a Madison Avenue ad agency. The comparable premise here concerns a prissy Harvard-educated African-American TV executive (Damon Wayans), under pressure from his blacker-than-thou white boss …
Murky vision of the future, from a novel by the founding father of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. John Travolta, a Hubbard disciple, co-produced, and also portrays the iron-fisted alien colonist on planet Earth in the year 3000, though his ham Shakespearean diction hardly indicates he's taking it seriously. Roger Christian …
Hey, remember when The Hunger Games came out and all your film geek friends said that it was just a Hollywood cleanup/ripoff of Battle Royale? Yeah, this is that movie.
Present-day parable of Paradise Found and Paradise Lost: more precisely, a legendary island Shangri-La somewhere near Thailand (from the air it looks like Never-Never Land in Disney's Peter Pan, meaning, among other things, that it looks painted instead of photographed), home to a Hippie Commune cum Club Med, as well …
Julian Schnabel's second film is, like his Basquiat, a conventional, celebratory biopic on an unconventional, subcultural hero: this time the homosexual Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. We take up his story in his female-dominated childhood (the boy lays his head against a tree trunk, stroking it, gazing at a group of …
Christopher Guest's gallery of caricatures of the people at and around the fictitious Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show: funny, yet disappointing. Or in other words: not as funny as his Waiting for Guffman, and lavishly overpraised in the reviews. (It gives reviewers a chance to be funny, in turn, by …
Two industrial-lubricant salesmen and a junior accountant in a hospitality suite in Wichita. In three acts. Kevin Spacey's automatic-pilot smugness and snideness underline the staginess of the piece. Danny DeVito minimizes, doesn't eliminate, the problem. And Peter Facinelli sounds as if he wants to be Tom Cruise, and certainly looks …
Overeager-to-please comedy about a gay Glaswegian hairdresser (Craig Ferguson) who travels to L.A. to take part in the annual Platinum Scissors competition. The "mockumentary" format permits the movie literally to make faces at the camera. With Frances Fisher, David Rasche, and Mary McCormack; directed by Kevin Allen.
Fluffy and forgettable bit of uplift about an unlikely lad in Margaret Thatcher's England, who drops out of the local boxing club, drops in on the all-girl ballet class that convenes in the same gym, and proves himself (not to the untrained eye, which might concede his potential as a …
And the gray area of white bleeding into black, the particular area of interest of the filmmaker-within-the-film (Brooke Shields), who follows around, with a camcorder the size of a paperback, a group of hip-hop hangers-on from Manhattan's Upper East Side: "I have a vision," she proclaims. "I want it to …
The forces of Good versus the forces of Evil in modern Manhattan, more specifically the forces of radiant serene ethereal CG imagery versus those of dark dirty squirmy CG imagery. Kim Basinger, a pair of worried eyes in a face of geisha-like immobility, inherits the newborn of her drug-addicted sister: …
Moral tale about the brash young turks (especially the pasty, mumbly Giovanni Ribisi) of a crooked stock brokerage. An uncinematic subject ("Do you know what 'bridge financing' is?") injected with testosterone and hip-hop. They're no help, and nor is the sickly bluish-greenish image. Writer-director Ben Younger is up front about …
This "fictionalized re-enactment" of events following the release of The Blair Witch Project revisits the Maryland wilderness with a fly-by-night tour guide and his party of sightseers: a psychic Goth, a militant Wiccan, and a married pair of nonfiction authors. (Bad actors, every one.) Aside from the continual references to …