A preening, fairly addictive movie about addiction. Bradley Cooper is Eddie, a blocked New York writer who takes mystery pills from an untrustworthy man. They give him fabulous powers, and Manhattan becomes the cracked mirror of Eddie’s rise to power. Of course, his real drug is ego, and Cooper achieves …
It’s hard to say which is a finer encapsulation of the proceedings: Robert De Niro sitting for a caricature artist at a children’s birthday party or Dustin Hoffman detonating a whoopee cushion and saying, “We have to laugh at the stuff that makes us human.” Put another way, whether you …
Co-writer and co-director Robert Rodriguez (writing with Álvaro Rodriguez, directing with Ethan Maniquis) makes a feature-length reality of the hypothetical little teaser trailer tucked into the overstuffed package of Grindhouse, a bad dream come true. If nothing else, it gives a nice big fat leading role to Danny Trejo, a …
Low-pressure comedy about the human urge to be somewhere or someone else. The contrived and self-conscious eccentricity of the set-up somewhat removes the theme from its rightful universality. Wayne, sarcastically nicknamed "Mad Dog" for his nonviolent tendencies, is a crime-scene photographer who would really rather be an art-gallery photographer. And …
Sticky seriocomedy, from a second-rate stage play by Scott McPherson, concerning the reunion of two middle-aged sisters after one of them is diagnosed with leukemia: all of the characters are at least half-cracked; most of them more than half. Meryl Streep, as a chain-smoking cosmetologist and single mom, is typically …
Director Kenneth Branagh -- not Mary Shelley -- has obviously done some dutiful research on the Romantic Era from which the original novel sprang. (Correct full title: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.) And the products of these researches have armed him with an excuse for any old expressive excess, and …
Martin Scorsese's volatile movie about reaching adulthood in New York's "Little Italy" is made up of a fistful of tough, partial truths, which are repeated frequently and adamantly to create the impression of the whole truth. His main idea of how to keep the excitement at a fever-pitch is to …
Twenty-five, thirty years earlier, a cast of Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand would have tilted the earth's axis. Nowadays they -- or at any rate Hoffman and Streisand, pickups for the sequel to Meet the Parents, as the hippie-dippy, touchie-feelie, loosey-goosey parents of the groom-to-be -- are …
A bad-to-worse weekend for a male nurse named Focker (you'll need several sets of fingers and toes to count up the utterances of that name), who accompanies his prospective fiancée to his prospective sister-in-law's wedding. The women, including the prospective mother-in-law, virtually fade into the woodwork, as all attention centers …
Old-fashioned, dewy-eyed salute to the Navy's first "colored" deep-sea diver -- a Jackie Robinson story. To put it securely in that framework, we even hear a snippet of play-by-play from a Robinson game over the hero's homemade radio, a gift from his sharecropper father. Nice moment when the smashed radio …
Feds and mobsters alike are after one little bounty hunter and a white-collar bail-jumper. The attempts at ingratiation are at times a little queasy-making (the bounty hunter was drummed out of the police force for his honesty, the embezzler took money from the mob and gave it to charity), but …
Not the final word on artistic compromise in the New Hollywood, but a good distance toward it. A down-on-his-luck producer picks a script (The Darkness and the Light) at random from his dead-letter pile, and tries to finance it with money from investors who only want to secure roles for …
An uncomfortable blend of Hollywood artifices, circa 1945, and bitter feminist truths, circa 1970. New York, New York is superficially a musical pastiche, incorporating bits and pieces of Big Band memorabilia, Love Me or Leave Me backstage soap opera, MGM's musical fantasies, and the Judy Garland cult. But its Big …
A lunkhead of a movie about an apparent lunkhead of a man, former middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta. Despite a number of Expressionistic and lyrical outbursts, a dull-minded realism rules this movie. And even the lyricism is dull-minded: the use of slow-motion to heighten the impact of the pulverizing …
Supernatural debunkers (Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy) investigate a blind psychic (Robert De Niro) who has recently come out of a long retirement. Written and directed by Rodrigo Cortés.