Writer-director John Hughes offers another piece of candy to teenagers, in hopes that they'll like him, maybe even (by now) appoint him an honorary lifetime member. A day of hooky is obviously a wide-open opportunity to prove the superior cunning, free-spiritedness, aliveness, and so forth, of youth over adults. And …
A wishful title for a slapstick comedy, and an unfulfilled one. It is neither fine nor a mess -- smooth, polished, sharply photographed (by Harry Stradling), but somehow remote, cold, antiquated. What started out to be a remake of the Laurel and Hardy short, The Music Box (you can still …
One fire rages within an innocent Catholic schoolgirl, the other within a guilty-of-vandalism honor-camp inmate. They meet at an improbable mixer -- reminiscent of the Suzanne Pleshette episode of Nevada Smith -- and burn out of control. (Actually they had already met in the forest, when the girl was in …
Fantasy from the Disney studio, starring Joey Cramer, directed by Randal Kleiser.
Jason rises from the grave to wreak havoc upon a new group of unsuspecting campers in the ultra-bloody rampage Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives -- Deluxe Edition. As a child, Tommy Jarvis killed mass-murderer Jason Voorhees. But now, years later, he is tormented by the fear that maybe …
Halfway decent pulp science fiction. The decent first half, give or take a few minutes, is straightforward and unpretentious storytelling in the mode of H.P. Lovecraft (on whose story it is more or less based), about an invention called the Resonator, intended to stimulate the pineal gland and awaken our …
Funky fairy tale. Eddie Murphy is the pure-in-heart, sharp-in-tongue Finder of Lost Children in seamy Los Angeles, although in what official capacity we are not to know. Nor are we to know how or why he has also been tabbed as The Chosen One, whose destiny it is to rescue …
An American movie shot in mainland China (and San Francisco) and spoken in Mandarin (and English), about a family of Chinese-Americans, all three of whom can use chopsticks but only one of whom can speak Chinese, who visit their nearest relatives in the homeland. ("Who are these strange people?" the …
In the previous movie by this name, the American attitude toward the Japanese (with Randolph Scott showing the way) favored annihilation. This one, forty-odd years later, about a Japanese takeover of an American auto plant, inclines toward compromise. Which is not to say that the face-off between Japanese regimentalism and …
By day, Sigourney Weaver is an underpaid researcher at the Institute for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies in London (with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a pair of designer eyeglasses to show for it); by night, an "escort girl" at the famous and infamous Jasmine Agency (and unbeknownst to her, a …
Hannah and Her Sisters runs an hour and forty-six minutes, rather long for a Woody Allen film, in fact the first of his films whose running time has stretched all the way to three figures. One might hope going into it that this would be a reflection of the larger …
Gene Wilder's spoof on the Old Dark House genre, a genre which seems to run to spoofs more often than not. John Morris's music is the only part of it that runs straight, and is paradoxically the most amusing part. All of the old familiar elements are here, as well …
Gunnery Sgt. Tom Highway, with a whisky-husky, phlegm-clogged voice, several patches of scar tissue on face and neck, and a haircut tapered like a bullet, is a decent addition to Clint Eastwood's repertory of roles: a Marine Corps lifer on the brink of mandatory retirement, with seven or eight tiers …