A piece of retro science fiction, seemingly rooted up from an early-days issue of Amazing Stories, and set appropriately in the very period, or at the very end of the very period: 1938. You have for starters your straight-arrow hero, a daredevil aviator with never-combed hanks of hair framing his …
The fanciful meeting-of-the-minds concept (patented by Steve Allen, among others) opens the door to endless intriguing possibilities, but the get-together of Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud touches off few sparks in this underdeveloped mystery movie, shot all in yellow, for no good reason. Rather than providing any sort of personality …
Five government-funded think-tank scientists, actually conducting themselves more like gag writers for a TV variety show, set in motion a whopping practical joke whereby an assistant professor at Columbia University is brainwashed into believing himself an extraterrestrial and is passed off as such onto the gullible world. This poor patsy …
A comedy of family shame, rooted in the personal experience of filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and accordingly set in 1976. The premise is full of potential, even if some of that potential is down the lower road of a weekly TV sitcom. A single dad, old enough to be regularly mistaken …
A man afraid of commitment suspects that his current girlfriend is the serial spouse-killer he has read about in the Weekly World News. Apart from his besetting phobia, the protagonist is gravely ill-defined: it's hard to reconcile his apparent wit and charm with his professional self as a throwback beat …
For 28 years, two loyal friends serve a concurrent prison sentence: Val (Al Pacino), behind bars for refusing to finger an associate, and Doc (Christopher Walken), on the outside, waiting to perform the hit when his old partner is released. You might think there isn’t much to this gangsters-get-old fable …
Twin brothers, identical except as to ethics, wrangle over the Santa Barbara estate of their adoptive mother. Sprawling family saga never recovers from its stumbling start: flashback within flashback within flashback, in an attempt to set its feet. Some attractive cast members -- Andy Garcia in one of his two …
Thin slice of American nutloaf, the main ingredients of which are two Albuquerque sisters partnered in the business of “Crime Scene Cleanup.” (A pre-credits shotgun suicide demonstrates the need.) Amy Adams, a single mom in an adulterous affair with an old boyfriend, is a roller-coaster actress overtly sharing every little …
Four (or so) intersecting plotlines on the themes of the pursuit of happiness and the quirks of fate, but snipped up and patched together so that events that follow each other on screen do not follow each other in chronology. Additional chopping-up and rearranging are achieved through chapter headings excerpted …
Quintessential blind-lady-in-distress thriller, from the theater piece by Frederick Knott, playwright also of Dial M for Murder. It's undeniably talky and stagy, but the device whereby the heroine learns that her new ally is really her new enemy is an ingenious bit of stagecraft, and it gains on screen from …