Facetious hard-boiled romantic thriller about the percolating passion between an Angst-ridden celibate hitman, Anthony LaPaglia, and his fatalistic target, Mimi Rogers (amused, amusing). You can see the ending coming miles away, and you go slower and slower the closer you get. A couple of warmish woman-on-top sex bits. With Matt …
Woody Allen's continued exploration of his beloved New York: the mythical past of Roaring Twenties speakeasies, the Broadway of Ziegfeld and O'Neill, the chorus girls, the Lost Generation café intellectuals, all that. New territory, for him. Once over lightly. For all its frothiness, though, it nonetheless gnaws on the Big …
The Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film of 1994. Not too hard to see why. Russians penitent about their Communist history (the purges of the Thirties, in specific) are bound to be warmly embraced in the West. On their knees and under the lash is how Westerners like them best. …
A British sickie with raw, scabby, anemic color to match. It concerns a pathological Thelma and Louise by the names of Eunice and Miriam, or Eu and Mi for short (or You and Me for deep), a homicidal loon and an apologetic simp: "I never stopped looking for the good …
Takeoff on Captains Courageous, in which a full-grown upper-class twit (Chris Elliott) gets marooned on a fishing boat with a crew of rummy old salts. From there, it takes off into Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Mysterious Island territory: a nautical zone called Hell's Bucket, with its shark-man (Russ Tamblyn), …
For No One. Well, for Children's Liberationists, actually, or Children's Bootlickists and Backpattists: a summer camp without adult supervision, not counting a way-cool defrocked drama teacher (Christopher Lloyd, hammy even for him). With Jonathan Jackson; directed by Jonathan Prince.
Who wants to know? The defunct Sixties TV show should have stayed there -- on TV, in the Sixties, defunct. David Johansen, John C. McGinley, Rosie O'Donnell, Fran Drescher; directed by Bill Fishman.
A situation reminiscent of Jack Clayton's Our Mother's House (1967): a family of sudden orphans buries their Mum on the premises and keeps her death a secret. Writer-director Andrew Birkin, working from a novel by Ian McEwan, takes an hour to get to where Clayton got in a few minutes; …
A distinguished name in movies: Arthur Ripley's The Chase, 1946; Arthur Penn's The Chase, 1966. Until now. The chase itself — cop cars after a hijacked BMW — wastes no time getting started; and the quick zooming, panning, cutting visual style is designed to encourage the viewer to follow the …
Conventional service comedy about two Navy Shore Patrolmen, a gravel-voiced veteran named Rock (Tom Berenger) and a swaggering young scammer on his final day before discharge (William McNamara, a ringer for Ricky Nelson), who are assigned to transport a double-D-cup prisoner (Erika Eleniak) bent on escape. The biggest joke of …
Back into James M. Cain territory: the decent average joe turned indecent and aberrant, and cherchez la femme. That isn't to say it's outdated -- not so long as men continue to make fools of themselves over women. But the old form needs a little something more than modern dress …
A Wong Kar-wai film made during a lull in the production of his far more ambitious Ashes of Time. The imitation-Godard (early-Godard) shooting style -- off-the-cuff, on-the-run -- scares up plenty of local atmosphere (cluttered, clattering Hong Kong) and plenty of individual idiosyncrasy: the whirling-dervish dance of a fast-food vendor …
Lina Wertmuller returns from oblivion, not with a vengeance, but with a peace overture: a make-nice comedy about a meeting of the minds in a third-grade classroom in an impoverished village in Southern Italy. Filmed predominantly in chin-chucking closeups. With Paolo Villaggio.
The fact that this is a sequel doesn't help it to a faster start than its forerunner. It dilly-dallies for over half an hour in the Big City, introducing a new character (Billy Crystal's hapless younger brother Jon Lovitz, taking up a space vacated by Bruno Kirby), and establishing the …
Terribly tedious amnesia comedy about a P.I. and murder witness (Dana Carvey, lightweight as lint) who starts each day with no memory of anything that came before: Korsakov's Syndrome, it's called. (Kind of an inversion of Groundhog Day, where the hero alone remembers the past. ) The premise seems to …