Just about 30 years ago, director Barry Levinson gave us Good Morning, Vietnam, the story of a fast-talking American operator who brings rock and roll to war-torn Vietnam. Now he's back with the story of a fast-talking American operator who brings rock and roll to war-torn Afghanistan. Plus ca change. …
Not just a dysfunctional family; a determinedly, unrelentingly oddball, eccentric, wacky, weird, kooky, cracked family; but only a rarely and very mildly funny family. (None of this deters Gene Hackman, as the long-absent head of the clan, from his normal excellence.) Wes Anderson, the director, favors frontal and centered compositions, …
Teen comedy for grownups, but not for squares, about an assortment of oddballs caroming off one another, never fitting together flush, at an exclusive private school called Rushmore Academy. The central oddball will not remain at the school for the duration, starting out on "sudden-death academic probation," frittering away far …
Dickens's Christmas Carol recast as a comic vehicle for Bill Murray: about the most depressing evidence yet available for the fate of the sentimental vein in fiction, with tons of "production values" to supply the crushing coup de grâce. Such is the depth of Murray's insincerity -- his remoteness from …
More fun to look forward to than actually to look at: a feature-lengthening of the TV commercials combining a live-action Michael Jordan and an animated Bugs Bunny, here reunited under the same director, Joe Pytka, along with other Looney Tunes luminaries, and at the last minute Bill Murray, for a …
When quick-witted slacker John Winger (Bill Murray) loses his apartment, girlfriend and job all in one day, he does what any red-blooded American would do: he joins the army and nearly starts WWIII. Directed by Ivan Reitman and also starring Harold Ramis, John Candy, and John Larroquette.
Don’t let the trailer’s promise of mirth fool you. Other than a need on Bill Murray’s part to finance a boat or pay off a bookie, there is no excuse for an actor of his caliber to dignify something as fraudulent and artificially sweetened as this vastly inferior riff on …
Only a poster of This Is Spinal Tap on the dormitory walls will remind anyone that this movie and that one were directed by the same man, Rob Reiner. That other movie must indeed have been a very special match-up of people and idea. This, on the other hand, is …
A fast-bonding psychiatric patient, after his first session with a new doctor, follows the man onto his summer vacation. Bill Murray lacks the guilelessness to pull this off (or the ability to fake it), and it doesn't help to have the script paving his way into everyone's heart but the …
Multiple-twist erotic thriller without the bare minimum of seriousness (the casting of Bill Murray as a Whiplash Willie shyster indicates a reluctance even to put up a front); more than the bare minimum, though, of salaciousness. The missing plot pieces are shuffled into the closing credits, for anyone who cares …
Nerdy, neurotic Jesse Eisenberg, the unlikeliest Texan, narrates a postmodern post-apocalyptic road trip through a population of secondhand flesh-eating zombies, in the company of the only three surviving humans east of Bill Murray’s mansion in Beverly Hills: the Twinkie-craving Woody Harrelson and two scamming sisters, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. …