Johnny Depp delivers his second film-incarnation of a Hunter S. Thompson character: Paul Kemp, a freelance journalist who takes a job at a financially crippled newspaper in Puerto Rico. Paul is quickly tangled in a web of illegal real estate deals, dangerous romantic prospects, and all manner of alcohol-related hijinks. …
Cheap-trick chiller from a Stephen King book. A Mississippi hick, an amusing John Turturro, shows up at the doorstep of a Stephen King-like popular author (Johnny Depp, playing a lot to the camera) to accuse him of plagiarism: "Ye-oo stowl mah stow-ry." Plagiarism as a subject might have been as …
A Tim Burton film, for certain, from start to finish and top to bottom. The reimagination of Washington Irving's urbane folktale as a turn-of-the-century murder mystery (that's the Eighteenth turning to the Nineteenth), with Ichabod Crane transformed from a superstitious country schoolteacher into a forward-thinking big-city detective sent to the …
Two pirate pictures set to open within a month of each other and neither star Johnny Depp?! Thymaya Payne’s Stolen Seas documents the current trend of Somali freebooters taking control of Danish merchant ships and ransoming off their crews. Declining the aid of an intermediary, shipping magnate Per Gullestrup negotiates …
The Grand-Guignol Broadway musical (words and music by Stephen Sondheim), Tim Burtonized for Hollywood. Which means, among other things (such as less music), a ton-of-bricks production design, an ashen color scheme sometimes edging up to the border of black-and-white (excluding the rivers, lakes, geysers of rich red blood), and the …
A new metaphor (preferable to Bedwetter no doubt) for the plight of the misfit, a coming-of-age tale, even a coming-to-confidence tale, concerning a feminine teenage boy (Lou Pucci, a blend of Johnny Depp and Scarlett Johansson) who hasn't yet weaned himself off his thumb. The first feature film of Mike …
Partly, if not equally, stop-motion animator Mike Johnson's Corpse Bride, a voguishly grotesque kiddie film in which all the characters look like reflections in fun-house mirrors, and the worm-eaten title figure is not appreciably more ghastly than the living. Indeed the netherworld boasts more color, albeit garishly expressionistic, than the …
Angelina Jolie is a comatose sculpture in this slack, dated load of thriller clichés. She glides her deadpan “acting” and mighty cheekbones around a postcard Venice, and Johnny Depp tags along like a puzzled puppy. The film achieves vacant star display and the worst canal chase ever, while wasting Venice, …
"People fear what they don't understand," drowsily intones Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp), a scientific genius who is uploaded to the Internet after his body gets taken out by a bunch of neo-Luddite radicals. True enough, Doc! You know what else they fear? Omniscient, omnipresent entities that can control all …
Kevin Reynolds, the director of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Waterworld, tries to rescue the legendary lovers from the clutches of Wagner and deliver them to the shopping mall. Deliver them, more exactly, to mushy, muddled action scenes, to dull, gray, lightless photography, to moonfaced, crêpe-flat closeups, to a …
Mark Rylance stars as an insouciant Magistrate With No Name, stationed at the outpost of an unspecified border, whose only brush with justice involves a case of pig-poaching. Light carved through a square in the Magistrate’s ceiling heralded a talented eye behind the lens, but nothing prepared me for shadow-sculptor …
The sort of title that seems highly unlikely to precede a good movie. What follows in this instance does not lower the odds. As a slice of family life in small-town America, the movie is so hell-bent on being "different" as to be unrecognizable as small-town America or as family …
Gene Wilder > Johnny Depp. But you knew that.