City Slickers at sea. An Illinois landlubber inherits a boat formerly of the Clark Gable estate, and takes his family on a Caribbean cruise under the tutelage of a one-eyed drunken old salt (Kurt Russell gargling rusty razor blades) of doubtful dependability. Formulaic -- and obsequiously so in the uplifting …
Not just another "biopic," but one that requires colossal gall for any actor or director to undertake. And Robert Downey, Jr., and Richard Attenborough, respectively, may reasonably be described as any old actor and director -- supremely uncharismatic in the first case, surpassingly pedestrian in the second. To their credit, …
But first the doubt, the ridicule, the intrigue, the sabotage, the mutiny, the head on the chopping block. And afterwards the sunken ship, the enslavement, the patricide, the storm at sea, the mortal illness. And always, always, the tedium, the monotony, the dullness, the grim determination to take Christopher Columbus …
An all but unbeatable tsk movie from Roland Joffé. (Shot of a cart-pulling beast of burden with its ribs showing through its hide. Tsk. Shot of a noseless leper. Tsk.) A crane-powered consciousness-raising project about the slums of Calcutta, it steers clear of the spiritual content of the story (taken …
Foreign film in the ever-popular peasant genre, with the ever-popular weaknesses of sentimentalizing and ennobling the subject. This time the peasants are a family of Inner Mongolians in a French-Russian co-production originally titled Urga (as in "Did you tie that red flag on my urga?"). Apart from the urga itself …
What kind of movie — what genre of movie — is this, anyway? It starts out as a classical but lurid mystery thriller; then wanders off on a search for a shared border between horror/fantasy and honest-to-God religious art; then takes a final superhuman broad jump into the purview of …
A cautionary tale concerning wife-swapping: your fellow swapper could turn out to be a sociopath who wants to frame you for murder and to steal your wife for keeps. The dilemma for the filmmakers -- scriptwriter Matthew Chapman and director Alan J. Pakula -- is how to make the premise …
A Roger Rabbit for the underground-comics consumer. In other words, the graphics are uniformly ugly, except for maybe the Vargas Girl called Holli Would, who is no worse than cocktail-napkin conventional. And the premise is a thorough mess: "interworld travel" between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the comic-book metropolis which an …
Slow, very slow coming-of-age process, set in Key West during the Vietnam War. (Historical markers: the Moon Shot; mooning; stringy long hair.) Goldie Hawn plays down, down, way down, as the single mother of a twelve-year-old boy, the unshowbizzy David Arnott. Lowest point: her interpretation of the topless dancer as …
The initial situation is distressingly static and stagy. A team of IRA terrorists in Northern Ireland have abducted an occupational English soldier (Forest Whitaker, with uncertain accent), one of whose captors (Stephen Rea), while awaiting a prisoner-swap deadline, gets to know the man intimately, even lending a helping hand when …
Unassuming, unassertive little feminist comedy about a Mexico City phone operator (by day) and competitive ballroom dancer (by night) whose Platonic dance partner of six years vanishes without a word. She goes hunting for him in Veracruz, finds new friends and a romantic fling instead. Maria Rojo is a winning …
Cheapo zombie comedy from New Zealand, in vigorously, aggressively bad taste. (That was the proud title of director Peter Jackson's first film: Bad Taste.) There are several laughs (the kung-fu clergyman: "I kick ass for the Lord!"), but nothing to compete with the quantities of blood, pus, severed limbs, entrails, …
Elixir-of-life fantasy about the rivalry between an aging actress and best-selling dietician. There's something Twilight Zone-y about the blend of black comedy and Sunday sermon, as well as about the anecdotal narrative. There is nothing Twilight Zone-y about the Silly Putty special effects -- as costly and seamless as they …