Among them, a battle with river rapids, a pinch from a crab, the defense of a chicken egg against an inquisitive hedgehog, and a ride on the back of a turtle. Milo, you understand, is a cat, Otis a dog. The biggest hardship either of them faces is a superslick …
Priscilla's just a bus; Mitzi, Felicia, and Bernadette are her passengers, two female impersonators and a transsexual (the gaunt Hugo Weaving, the muscle-bound Guy Pearce, and the grande damish Terence Stamp), who take their cabaret act out of the cosmopolitan security of Sydney and into the backward Outback. There's a …
The athleticism in this Warner Brothers swashbuckler is shown to be of a dubious character when Eugene Pallette, built like an egg, outmaneuvers Errol Flynn in a five-minute stick fight on a foot-wide plank. From that moment, it is plain that the memorized moments in the Robin Hood legend are …
Buñuel's rascally subversions and perversions seem, in a way, more precious in the period prior to when they were expected of him (him, the Sovereign Surrealist), when instead they had to be smuggled out furtively, nervily, when they came from under the counter only. And there is hardly a better …
We already knew that Jay Ward's Rocky and His Friends was the hip kids' show of the Sixties. Now we know that screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan and director Des McAnuff knew it, too. But knowing it and being it are two different things. The mumbo-jumbo that permits the three inept villains …
Philip Roth, no less, lauded mentor Saul Bellow as the first Jewish author to gain acceptance in a Christian world. He was championed by readers and peers alike as the literary voice who defined his generation. What became of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author? Long before the woke brigade loomed on …
Normal teen confusion, compounded by a mop-haired stepdad who's undergoing a sex change ("He still wants to be with my mom, so I guess that makes him a dyke"). A coming-of-age tale, circa 1983, with that special American-independent spin -- or wobble. Unreal, unfunny, uninvolving. With Adrian Grenier, Clark Gregg, …
The daydream superheroes of a bullied grade-schooler come to life, pull him out of the classroom, fly him to Planet Drool (Where Kids Rule), ride the Train of Thought to the Land of Milk and Cookies, take a Banana-Split Boat down the Steam of Consciousness, and so on. Didactic kiddie …
Notwithstanding some larger deficiencies, the quality of individual gags is reasonably high -- high-spirited, high-strung. There are several larger deficiencies to withstand, however. Gene Wilder, who seems understandably hard-pressed by the multiple chores of acting, writing, and directing, tends to chase after the closest laugh; and the plot and characters, …
Another animated mouse from the Disney studio, in fact a whole society of them underneath (and a perfect mirror image of) the London of 1897. They have their own mouse queen beneath Buckingham Palace, who coincidentally happens to be celebrating her own Diamond Jubilee. And they have a portly medical …
Three of the Franco-Belgian comic-book yarns by Hergé are smoothly poured into a pretty, motion-capture animation by Steven Spielberg. Short on real cartooning, long on quaintness, short on story, long on hectic action, it is for unimaginative boys 7 to 12. For the rest of us, it is a kind …
One of the better of Otto Preminger's sprawling adaptations of big, fat, multi-character, best-selling novels, this one Allen Drury's melodramatic civics lesson on cut-throat politics in D.C. The large cast -- Fonda, Laughton, Pidgeon, Don Murray, George Grizzard, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney (a comeback role for the star …
Right on screen at the outset, the viewer, or reviewer, is enjoined not to reveal the identity of "the client." (The Miramax company, hoping to recapture past fortune, even makes specific reference to its The Crying Game.) But this willfully misrepresents, or misunderstands, the nature of the narrative. The client's …
Karan Johar writes and directs this story of a heartbroken woman who finds comfort with a singer. In Hindi.
The live-action adaptation of an MTV cartoon remains so cartoonish — what with its computer-generated futuristic utopia, computer-animated internal organs, computer-manipulated stunts and body doubles, computer this and computer that — it's a wonder it bothered with flesh-and-blood actors at all. Charlize Theron, who may have been worried after Monster …