The burnt-to-a-crisp and resurrected superhero from the Todd McFarlane comic books, and the HBO cartoon series, comes -- like a Batman out of Hell -- to live action, or at least partially live. His assorted powers -- his cape, his armor, his spikes, his chains -- and his shapeshifting enemies …
Kiefer Sutherland's unambitious directing debut, a lamsters-and-hostages item ("Shut the fuck up!" "We're fucked!" etc.), overdependent on head shots. The complications are more than the novice can handle. (There's an undercover agent in the group: what's he waiting for?) The hardest thought seems to have gone into the selection of …
It's not hard to figure out why the promotional campaign trumpets "from Executive Producer Terrence Malick" for writer-director Julio Quintana's story of a ruined seaside village where all the women started wearing black (and stopped getting pregnant) after a wave claimed several dozen schoolchildren. (Well, all the women except one: …
A somewhat livelier movie about the stock market than "Rollover" -- praise so faint that it would do better just to lie down with a cool washcloth pressed to its forehead. And Michael Douglas, while no less of a Leftish actor happy to cut his own character's throat, is a …
Wanting to be taken more seriously as an actor and director, Emilio Estevez navigates a well-marked short cut: to Vietnam, and to the tempestuous readjustment of a war vet to civilian life. The dynamic of the central family of four is credible, especially in the ways in which hurt can …
Documentarist Chris Paine investigates the automotive murder, and finds, as in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, many bloody hands: the oil industry, the car companies, the federal government, the consumer, et al. Essentially this is in the nature of a TV news-magazine talking-head report, and it doesn't do …