Thrills built on a sound psychological foundation: the unease of being a stranger. A Massachusetts yuppie couple, driving cross-country, become separated by car trouble, and the husband afterwards can't find the wife. This situation might call to mind the Dutch suspense film, The Vanishing, except that the trail never cools …
Cultural mix-and-match. A beautiful expatriate Croat in New Zealand agrees to a mock marriage with a Chinese immigrant while carrying on an intimate relationship with an indigenous Maori. (Which leads to an intimate scene, just between you, her, and the toilet bowl, of a urine-stream home-pregnancy test.) The tyrannical Croatian …
True story, incredibly bland in the telling, about an eccentric millionairess who, in the afterglow of the Scopes Trial, attempts to raise chimps and a gorilla as fully constituted, fully clothed members of the family. The parrot in the kitchen gets all the laughs. All two or three. With Rene …
First announced under the title of An Alan Smithee Film, it then turned into an actual Alan Smithee film: Alan Smithee being the official Hollywood pseudonym of any director who, for any variety of reasons, has withdrawn his name from a project. Arthur Hiller (who appears in the outtakes at …
The title, besides being the name of an Irish folk song, is a fitting appellation for the young protagonist once he becomes an employee in a butcher shop: a square-faced little carrot-top with the mischievous look of a ventriloquist's dummy. This problem child of an alcoholic father and a suicidal …
From Mike Leigh, another polished, flinty, brilliant fragment in the monumental mosaic of the Human Comedy. The fundamental and solid idea of the thing is to compare and contrast (back and forth, with no set plan) the personalities of two love-hungry girlfriends at two separate stages of their lives: their …
A let's-put-on-a-show musical, set in Golden Age Hollywood and among a cartoon cast of primarily animals. Tolerably lively and clever, especially in view of the energy-conserving animation, but the nostalgia element (throwaway caricatures of Laurel and Hardy, Bette Davis, Mae West, etc., as in an old Looney Tune) will overshoot …
The third installment, after Clerks and Mallrats, in the "New Jersey Trilogy" of Kevin Smith, and easily the most ambitious and daring of the three. This is especially measurable in Smith's efforts to broaden his range into areas of the sincere, the sentimental, the downright sappy -- suspiciously similar to …
Comedy about Commies: the one-night fling of a comely Australian firebrand and old Joe Stalin himself, and the resulting offspring. It could hardly have been any unfunnier had it been made by card-carrying Party members. With Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill, F. Murray Abraham; directed by Peter Duncan.
Basic, bare-bones crime film about a double-crossed jewel thief with a score to settle ("I'm my own police"). John Irvin's no-nonsense direction is a little short of style (the credits sequence -- grainy black-and-white imagery of the snaky lines of L.A. freeways -- raises false expectations), but it pushes the …
A modern-day Job -- he has lost his wife and unborn child, his house, his job, and although not his dog, at least his dog's left front leg -- and unless and until God gives him some answers to tough questions ("What kind of a God takes a dog's leg?"), …
At some level, inaccessible to the naked eye, this could be classified as a jailbreak thriller, but any family resemblance to the likes of Black Tuesday or The Concrete Jungle has been obliterated beneath the mask of spectacle -- the cosmetic surgery, the collagen injections, the earrings and nose studs, …
Paranoia thriller without a milliwatt of power to compel belief. Mel Gibson, reunited with his Lethal Weapon director, Richard Donner, is an addlepated Manhattan cabbie, loonier than Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, who puts out a newsletter of exposés on the order of "The Oliver Stone-George Bush Connection." (Number of subscribers: …
Starry-eyed science fiction, seemingly designed or destined to be blurbified into a "2001 for the Nineties" — complete with otherworldly light show and a solarized encounter with a Higher Intelligence. The very opening of the movie lays out the fictional terrain — light-years and light-years of it — as we …