A let's-kick-butt military operation against a noncontroversial butt: a South American drug cartel. The weapons of choice are helicopters (our Apaches vs. their Scorpion), and the aerial combat gets those old jingoistic juices flowing. The preliminaries are as abbreviated as they are predictable. With Nicolas Cage, Sean Young, and Tommy …
Policemen don't make the best ghoul-hunters; their minds and their methods are too pedestrian. Tess the Psychic is thus reduced to a squad-car sidekick, and Sister Marguerite with her crucifix-cum-dagger languishes too long on the sidelines. Lou Diamond Phillips, Tracy Griffith, Jeff Kober, Elizabeth Arlen; written and directed by Robert …
Mad-doctor stuff (or mad-med-student, rather) about laboratory-controlled beyond-and-back experiments, to unlock "the secret of death." (Death, we find, is pleasant enough, no more painful than a Stan Brakhage underground movie, till you have to confront past sins and think about atonement.) The medical school and hospital is altogether a pretty …
Ireland post-First World War, mid-War of Independence, then post-That War Too. A small movie of large ambition, even squashingly overlarge. Ireland itself, in cold steely light, comes off well. The actors come off needy. Iain Glen, Julie Christie, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio; directed by Pat O'Connor.
Amazon princess (former beauty queen Laura Herring) comes to America to save her forest from a multinational petroleum corporation ("You're talking about the hole in the ozone! That's important to everyone!"), teaches a Beverly Hills playboy the lambada, and wins a dance contest in order to deliver her message on …
One of John Frankenheimer's potboilers-for-world-betterment, this one about a tit-for-tat rivalry between a U.S. and a U.S.S.R. colonel (embittered Vietnam vet and embittered Afghanistan vet), which begins as an exchange of snowballs across the Czech border and escalates to the brink of World War III. Well past, that is, the …
Latter-day screwball comedy about an NYU film student (not much gotten from that background, apart from a snickeringly satirized professor) who gets involved in a Mob-operated Gourmet Club, boasting a menu of endangered species for a minimum of $200,000 a plate. Although not well paced or light afoot, it's truly …
Excruciating romantic comedy about a middle-aged man obsessed with making a baby and having no luck doing it. The pain, though pretty much constant, is at its intensest whenever comedy makes way for "sensitivity" (at which times the pain meant to be felt in your heart slips instead to the …
Accurately but laconically named, this beyond-the-grave love story doodles around much too long on being a before-the-grave love story, making sure that the pertinent couple will be seen as nothing less than the Perfect Couple, admirable, enviable, unimprovable. (The thinking seems to be that one of them dying and then …
The Corleone saga continues, after a hiatus of sixteen years of real time, twenty years of screen time. This third installment traverses less ground than its forerunners, only a few months in "1979" [sic], anchored historically to the ascension and theoretical assassination of Pope John Paul I, who, it will …
Jamie Uys's surprise 1980 hit out of South Africa -- out of nowhere, in effect -- is in one respect unrepeatable: the surprise part of it, if not also the magnitude of the hit. But the lightness of his touch has not gotten any heavier, nor has the sloppiness of …
A strong contender as Martin Scorsese's most negligible, most dispensable, most redundant movie. Here we go again: the subjective tracking shot through a nightclub, the stack of goldie-oldies to be gone through on the soundtrack, the torturously repetitive dialogue ("fuckin' " this and "fuckin' " that). Yes, there's a new …
Say what you will about (and against) Under the Cherry Moon, but it was a most unusual movie. This, Prince's next fictional effort, is decidedly more usual, decidedly more like Purple Rain: an extended music video, all fog and colored lights, about an extended battle of the bands, the "spiritual" …