High-tech tale of betrayal and revenge, lighthearted to the point of self-contradictory and callous (Charlize Theron does, at least, haul off and sock the man who murdered her father: that sure felt good), mechanically directed by F. Gary Gray. As remakes go, it has the advantage of coming from an …
The Los Angeles-based Kentucky Fried Theater ensemble makes its movie debut with strung-together parodies of movies and television (included are an interminable take-off on Bruce Lee and a reasonably amusing shorter one on TV courtroom dramas). These parodies use a grapeshot attack, which is to say they are off target …
Jane Fonda is allowed to talk out much of her characterization of a pricey Manhattan call girl, by way of tape recordings, phone calls, psychiatric sessions. But while maintaining a sympathetic and an open ear, director Alan Pakula appears to be distracted by the problems of fitting her, just so, …
Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren star in this ambling comedy about dementia on board a Winnebago.
Model prisoner vs. malformed warden. Some rugged action, subverted by unmanly supplications for pity. The cast (except, principally, Donald Sutherland's warden, trained at the Kafka School of Penology, with further studies at the De Sade Management Institute) is solid. An especially eye-catching turn by Tom Sizemore as the hero's toady …
A Problem Picture about problem teenagers at an exclusive "behavioral modification" facility. Adam Horovitz, one of the musical Beastie Boys, looks well and moves well as the principal problem. Smirks well, that is, and swaggers well, something like a young Richard Gere -- young enough, in fact, that all of …
The sense of humor in this smart-ass service comedy is actually more sick-making than all the bloody operating room splish-splashing. The gags are constructed to have a practical-joke thrust: there is always a victim and a violator. The jokers are a couple of barbarians, conceitedly acted by Elliott Gould and …
This could be lumped together with Only When I Laugh and I Ought to Be in Pictures, to form a sort of Generational Estrangement trilogy by Neil Simon. The surface is slick enough, but the fairy-tale storyline -- a drop-out father drops back in after twenty-eight years, bearing a briefcase …
The idea of loosing Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Jack the Ripper is such a good one that it isn't surprising it was thought of before, in a rather better and lighter movie than this one, called A Study in Terror. Christopher Plummer does not show us Holmes at …
An Agatha Christie mystery of no great consequence (if that isn't tautologous), with neither Marple nor Poirot in the detective role, but rather an American paleontologist named Calgary, trying to clear a dead man's name and his own conscience. Donald Sutherland handles the sense of justice and sense of guilt …
Robert Redford's directorial debut, an adaptation of the Judith Guest best-seller, comes out with an emotional plea in favor of hugging. That practice, especially if done in fine cardigans, is seen as a balm to the psychological scars of a guilt-ridden teenage boy (Tim Hutton, who, like his father Jim, …
Neo-noir dark comedy about a suburban family man cum hitman in midlife crisis, developing a crush on a fellow patient in his therapist's waiting room. There is nothing credible about the hero's vocation -- his only underworld contact is his father; his wife thinks he merely runs a mail-order business …
By this time the Jane Austen novel qualifies as a repertory piece, a mettle-test for would-be Darcys and Elizabeth Bennets, little different from Romeo and Juliet. The team behind the present production of it, apart from their attempt to replace the titular conjunction with a dashing ampersand, earn no points …
More extraterrestrial copycats: they not only copy the outward forms of earthlings, they also copy Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, things similar. More precisely, they are stingray-like parasites that attach themselves to human spinal columns: they don't really take the forms of earthlings; they take them over. Old …