The title specifies the distance over which an NYPD detective must transport a garrulous witness from jail to courthouse in Lower Manhattan, weaving through a whole platoon of murderously corrupt cops; and the hour-and-a-half duration approximates the time limit allotted to get him there. Overextended even at that tidy length, …
Second-chance fantasy that, through the agency of a bewhiskered supernatural school janitor, sends the middle-age-crazy hero not back in time, but back in age, back to the high school of his youth, so that he must fend off the incestuous flirtations of his teenage daughter and make age-inappropriate advances to …
Grandfather and grandson swap personalities, and reverse the digits in their ages, after plowing the Rolls into a storefront. The old man's body remains laid up at the hospital, while his soul does handsprings inside a college freshman: this arrangement allows George Burns to fire off some interior-monologue wisecracks without …
Bernardo Bertolucci combines a pamphleteer's penchant for straight, party-line ideology and a best-selling novelist's flair for wanton sensation: heaps of flesh, blood, and excrement (of both the literal and figurative sort). In its breadth, if not in its detail, this maxi-budgeted extravaganza could loosely be termed "novelistic." But just whose …
It’s being touted as his 100th starring role, but Jackie Chan’s heroics take a backseat to Winston Chao’s endless speech-making in this commemorative retelling of the birth of the Republic of China. Unless you have more than a working knowledge of the subject, this could conceivably be the longest two …
The sighting of a stray Japanese submarine off the California coast ignites a slapstick panic which might more revealingly have been titled The Japs Are Coming, The Japs Are Coming. Steven Spielberg must have figured that if Stanley Kramer could resuscitate slapstick comedy (cf. It'a a Mad, Mad [etc.] World), …
Exciting year, excruciating movie. Ernest (On Golden Scum) Thompson, directing for the first time in addition to writing, makes a characteristically shallow belly-flop onto deep thematic waters: Vietnam, the generation gap, long hair, LSD — that whole package. The finale — a funeral party turned protest march — is guaranteed …
During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon at a private school on the outskirts of Beirut, 11-year-old Wissam tries to tell a classmate about his crush on her, while his teachers on different sides of the political divide, try to mask their fears. Directed by Oualid Mouaness, written by Oualid Mouaness, …
In 1992, Mercer (Tyrese Gibson) is desperately trying to rebuild his life and his relationship with his son (Christopher A’mmanuel) amidst the turbulent 1992 LA uprising following the Rodney King verdict. Across town, another father and son (Ray Liotta and Scott Eastwood) put their own strained relationship to the test …