In the latter days of World War II, a band of charming, aging misfits (Bill Murray! George Clooney! Bob Balaban! John Goodman! Matt Damon! Plus that French guy and that English dude!) is tasked with designating, preserving, and ultimately, recovering the art looted by the Nazis during their European conquest …
Another quietly offbeat project for actor-turned-director Keith Gordon (The Chocolate War, A Midnight Clear), a somber and somnolent treatment of the irony-laden Vonnegut novel about an American spy in wartime Germany, to outward appearances employed, where he can do more harm than good, as a Nazi radio propagandist who nightly …
Christine Lahti's first movie. As a director, that is. At feature-length. Not that that persuades her to pace herself. Overemphasizing and overexplaining her points with wide-angle and computer-graphic distortions (the English teacher's vampire fangs, the high-school bimbo's ballooning lips), she pretty much punches herself out before she ever arrives at …
The opening is pure [Shane] Black: we soar over the ruined ‘70s Hollywood sign to catch a boy sneaking his dad’s porno mag and ogling the centerfold, just before a car driven by said centerfold crashes through his house and plunges into the ravine below. The boy investigates, finds her …
A road comedy, “based upon The Odyssey by Homer,” about three chain-gang fugitives in Depression-era Mississippi. (The title, should you need reminding, comes from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels: the proposed title for a “meaningful” film by a refractory Hollywood contract director, whose subsequent quest to get in touch with the …
A vamp and three chumps. Liv Tyler, even with the help of photographic gimmicks, isn't up to the central role. Michael Douglas's coonskin-cap toupee is the best joke, but that's not saying much. With Matt Dillon, John Goodman, and Paul Reiser; directed by Harald Zwart.
A sort of heterosexual sequel to Cruising. Not an actual sequel, only a sort of. Al Pacino, the New York cop who dolled himself up in black leather and haunted the gay bars in search of a serial killer, has now taken out a matching ad in New York Weekly …
Colorful, to say the least. Color-overflowing, to say a little more. Color-engulfed. The live-action version of the late-Sixties made-in-Japan TV cartoon is of course, in this day and age, only partly live-action: real people like Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Matthew Fox inserted into a world …
The slob-vs.-snob soaper, Stella Dallas, remade with exactly the amount of taste and tact that ought to enable it to empathize completely with the heroine. It nonetheless seems like a forced march: the roomful of balloons for a marriage proposal, the food fight to make the dinner guests feel at …
A diptych by Todd Solondz, composed of one part called "Fiction" and another part called "Nonfiction." (The first revolves around a Creative Writing class, the second around a documentary film: equally fictitious.) Both parts permit Solondz to re-echo some of the accusations -- an "ugly" comment in part one, a …
There’s trouble with the terminally cute script in this, Clint Eastwood’s first actor-for-hire job since In the Line of Fire (1993). Clint stars as a corroded baseball scout with three months left on his contract. A severe case of macular degeneration forces him to make every day take-your-estranged-child-to-work day. Clint’s …
David Byrne's obtainment of a director's hat, in addition to his on-screen cowboy hat, does not quite signal the transfusion of fresh blood and fresh ideas which rock-and-rollers everywhere must feel sure Hollywood could use from them. His True Stories, neither exactly true nor stories, is modestly subtitled, with tongue …
Was blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston, enjoying himself) a self-serving, self-righteous Type A who confused the cause of social justice with his own desire to live well? Or was he a brilliant, pro-worker Good American who figured out how to keep the S.S. Good Conscience afloat during the Red …
It has a rather weighty science-fiction component: the time-honored theme of the superiority of emotional humans to unemotional superhumans. But then it's supposed to be funny in addition. The idea -- fairly intelligent for a Hollywood comedy, which might help explain its pratfall at the box-office -- is to take …