Demoted from prototype to copycat, the classic comic strip comes to the screen in the dust of Problem Child and (thanks to a robber on the prowl) Home Alone. The small-town setting, however, apart from the automobiles, seems to belong to an earlier day: no skateboard? no Nintendo? Director Nick …
A genuine curiosity co-written and co-directed by New Zealanders Stewart Main and Peter Wells, a Victorian-period bodice-ripper about a romantic hexagram (i.e., overlapping triangles), spectacularly camped up with operatic acting, baroque camerawork, Expressionistic color (liberal splashes of cardinal red in particular), and artificial studio sets. It has something of the …
Biopic -- no, hagiopic -- on the Hong Kong film star and so much more: cultural ambassador, martial-arts revolutionist, mixed-race family man. The source material is the memoir of Lee's widow (subtitle: The Man Only I Knew), so you know not to expect much iconoclasm. Even so, you might not …
A bottle of Alan Rudolph's watered-down and chilled romanticism: a noir-ish fairy tale about a pair of twins separated at birth (cringing nerd, swaggering hood) and now living, unaware of each other, in an imaginary city of quasi-science-fictional decay and chaos. The performances (excepting chiefly the swaggering half of Matthew …
Italian short-story collection -- three in all, by screenwriter Tonino Guerra and three different directors. The biggest name, Giuseppe Tornatore, contributes the slightest and dullest, to do with a stray mutt who attaches himself to a lonely old stuck-in-his-ways bachelor. The other two have a more explicit, more titillating eroticism …
Ripped from today's headlines! It begins with a traffic jam reminiscent of the one at the beginning of Fellini's 8 H -- if anything, a bit more grotesque -- but the hero, a laid-off defense worker, doesn't just imagine an escape from his car; he actually walks off and leaves …
Wim Wenders's first sequel. The work which it continues, after a six-year interruption, is Wings of Desire, the absolute last of the director's movies to warrant continuation, excepting perhaps The Scarlet Letter. But here they come again, those invisible, colorblind, mind-reading, ineffectual angels on patrol in a black-and-white Berlin. Bruno …
Cultural-exchange item from China. On the receiving end, it demonstrates that trendy cinematography can freely cross the Pacific and that the doors of Mainland China are wide open to it: the gently teetering Steadicam, the oozing light, the muted color, the soft focus, the powdery atmosphere, etc. Half the time …
Cultural-exchange item from China. On the receiving end, it demonstrates that trendy cinematography can freely cross the Pacific and that the doors of Mainland China are wide open to it: the gently teetering Steadicam, the oozing light, the muted color, the soft focus, the powdery atmosphere, etc. Half the time …
Junior-teen high adventure about an African-born white girl, tenderfoot tourist boy, and young Bushman fleeing from poachers across the barren Kalahari ("Wind can do it, we can do it"). Walkabout it isn't. Director Mikael Salomon, like Nicolas Roeg a proven cinematographer, finds lots of pretty landscapes and tangerine skies, not …
All of the principals are homed in on pulp-thriller stereotypes (Armand Assante, tough guy; Sherilyn Fenn, girl Friday; Sean Young, man-trap; Kate Nelligan, gold-digger), but the gags are all over the map: Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, obviously, but also Cape Fear, Sleeping with the Enemy, Double Indemnity, Body Heat, …
A stick-up man (mitigating circumstance: he only robs drug dealers) gets stuck with his two abandoned children, escapees of an abusive foster-care facility, en route to his next planned heist in New Orleans, with the cops of five states in hot pursuit. The movie has a bam-bam-bam rhythm, and a …
Slow, grave, contemplative, talky. Especially talky. A plane-crash survivor -- the crash itself is initially skipped over, then gradually pieced together in harrowing flashbacks -- comes through the ordeal a new man, with a new and sensuous awareness of the world around him, and a new and annoying aura of …
Credulous retelling of a UFO tall tale: the alien abduction of Travis Walton from the Arizona timberland for five days in 1975. The movie has many of the problems of true stories (lack of imagination, lack of vision, lack of resolution), without the compensating believability. The recollection of the actual …