Slow-to-start and long-to-end espionage thriller (or the further adventures of Dr. Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's CIA guy from Patriot Games), detailing a covert and illicit military action against the Colombian drug cartels. There's a well-staged ambush at around the hour mark (sole survivor: Harrison Ford), and an exciting rescue near …
Two of them, a conscientious convenience-store one and a goof-off video-store one: best buddies, and close cousins of the populace of Slacker. Spanning one day in the lives, the micro-budgeted movie is, perhaps appropriately, scruffy in appearance (coarse-grained, high-contrast black-and-white) and scabrous in manner. Driblets and droplets of humor slip …
Formulaic John Grisham legal thriller (a little bit of lawyering, a lot of dashing about), in which the author adopts an underdog or two, and throws them a steady diet of bones, biscuits, hamburger, filet mignon, as they dodge and run circles round the powerful and the baleful. The latter, …
Warts-and-nothing-but portrait by Ron (Bull Durham) Shelton of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, brawler, wife-beater, gun-wielder, whorer, boozer, pill popper, reckless driver, cusser, racist, anti-Semite -- oh, and once upon a time baseball player. It concentrates on the seventy-second and last year of his life, witnessed close up by his handpicked biographer-cum-chauffeur-cum-nurse, …
The soundless opening shots -- of soldiers stripping the bodies on an 1807 battlefield, piling them on carts, dumping them in mass graves -- summon up a powerfully oppressive mood. And the introduction of the title character as an ambulatory ghost (the Beethoven piece on the soundtrack is the "Ghost" …
Amateurish murder mystery in which a psychoanalyst tries to smoke out a killer from the quintet of suspects in his group-therapy sessions. Any halfway attentive viewer will very early be able to solve the mystery for himself. All he will need to go on are a couple of too-long-dangling questions …
The police set up a stakeout in a suburban residence, and the comic machinery starts to creak and groan: the crusty cop goes all gooey inside, and the timid family man regains some respect. Handsome photography by Gerry Fisher (handsomer than warranted), and Jack Palance, while looking as if he …
A little girl, traumatized by her mother's death, comes out of her shell to nudge her father and their black housekeeper (jazz lovers both) into romance. The writer-director, Jessie Nelson, does a lot of nudging also, making double sure we know precisely how we're supposed to feel about everything and …
A plotline copied from straight-faced action films like Coogan's Bluff and Trackdown (a bit more Trackdown, but in the setting of Coogan's Bluff); a trendy soirée appropriated from Midnight Cowboy; a standard collection of hicks-in-the-city jokes: ordering a meal at the Waldorf ("You got any Popsicles?") and causing the cellist …
Spike Lee knows enough camera tricks to keep you glued to the screen. Though not necessarily with pleasure. The sequence here that most nearly approaches outright pain, in fact crosses well over the threshold of it, is the one that employs an anamorphic lens to compress the players into funhouse-mirror …
The comic-book fantasy during the filming of which Brandon (son of Bruce) Lee was shot to death with a prop pistol. We have been assured that the fatal accident has been left out of the final cut, but that doesn't eliminate the ghoulishness of the thing. It's an essential element …
The comic-book fantasy during the filming of which Brandon (son of Bruce) Lee was shot to death with a prop pistol. We have been assured that the fatal accident has been left out of the final cut, but that doesn't eliminate the ghoulishness of the thing. It's an essential element …