Robert De Niro's directing debut -- a chance to dedicate a movie to the memory of his father, and immediately afterwards to give written thanks to songwriter Sammy Cahn. What else? To select golden oldies for a coming-of-age story set in the Sixties; to let a first-person narrator lay the …
From Brian De Palma, the same old thing. Excepting Sean Penn. Or anyhow Sean Penn's hairdo: a thinning-on-top Art Garfunkel-y blond frizz, for the role of a crooked, coked-up lawyer. The leading chameleon of the American screen can be counted on always to show you a new look. Otherwise, it's …
Diary film, divided into three "chapters." In the first, the director, writer, and star Nanni Moretti putters around on his Vespa (lengthy tracking shots from behind him), looking at buildings (lateral tracking shots), dropping in on movies, seeking out the murder site of Pasolini. In the next, he visits a …
Fine in principle: three goyim (Ellen Burstyn, Diane Ladd, Olympia Dukakis) ought to be able to portray Jewish widows, and a black director (Bill Duke) and past specialist in action films (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover) ought to be able to direct them. All it should take is imagination. …
AIDS-era La Ronde. The round robin of sex partners proposes a number of alternatives to old-fashioned copulation: fully clothed sex, unconsummated sex, no-contact sex. All in all it creates a climate of tolerance, somewhat at war with the climate of tedium. The grayish dull color sets the tone, and the …
The ten-minute prologue, of the Rocky Mountain Rescue team in action, should drench the palms of the mildest acrophobe. From there, it's pretty much downhill (so to speak), despite a plane crash, three scattered valises containing $30 million each, and a gang of bad guys who keep trying to outdo …
True story poured into a comedic jello mold. It tells of the first Jamaican bobsled team, who in 1988 qualified for the Calgary Olympics, and went on from there, outside the scope of the movie, to pitch Miller's Lite. You come out of the theater knowing less about the sport …
From a narrated prologue that relates how a Renaissance alchemist fled to Vera Cruz during the Spanish Inquisition, how he tinkered away on a secret invention, and how he met his fate in a cave-in in 1937(!), the action proceeds with cautious pace and meticulous circumstantiation into what amounts to …
Teenage Fatal Attraction. The crushee is the yuppie journalist (Pique Magazine) in the guest house out back. The crusher is a spoiled Lolita (fourteen, nearly fifteen), roller-blader, sunbather, classical pianist, literary stylist, champion equestrian, entomologist, all-around Wunderkind, and fledgling frame-up artist. Sillier and sillier. With Cary Elwes, Alicia Silverstone, Jennifer …
Character sketch, in fussy fine-point, of the town nutball, a repressed, ridiculed, Coke-bottle-lens-wearing, Fig-Newton-loving spinster. A psychological "label" is expressly withheld, but with Debra Winger doing her up large, she's more a performance than a person, a trick-bag of tics and quirks, an oddity for public exhibition. With Gabriel Byrne, …
Stephen King's Jekyll-and-Hyde variation is as convoluted and garbled as we have come to expect. A college Lit. professor and writer of "serious fiction" is threatened with the exposure of his pulp-novelist pseudonym. Why on earth — given the heritage of Kenneth Fearing, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, et al. — …
A recasting of The Prisoner of Zenda or The Prince and the Pauper or State Secret (or others) as a post-Perot piece of sentimental populism about a Presidential look-alike who's installed in the Oval Office by Machiavellian wire-pullers when the real President is laid low by a stroke. (Overexertion with …
Richard Linklater, maker of Slacker, drifts into the mainstream with a multi-character comedy about the last day of school, 1976, and the long night of celebration: beer, weed, bad music, bad hair, bad pants, etc. The writer-director maintains his air of detachment, and even of universal disdain, but he has …
2032 A.D. The repressive utopia of San Angeles (merger of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego) is disrupted when a 20th-century criminal called Simon Phoenix (the name is bad enough; the yellow hair is worse) escapes from cryo-prison. The cop who put him there, and who has inhabited an ice …