Robert De Niro and Al Pacino share a lot more screen time than in Heat, though they’re both thirteen years droopier as past-retirement-age homicide detectives on the case of a cop serial killer (not a serial cop killer), a plot of transparent tricksiness. Jon Avnet’s main directorial idea is, one …
Cryptic cloak-and-dagger adventure, with the Russians and the Irish in competition for the unidentified contents of a metal suitcase currently in the possession of unidentified secret agents. One of the two credited screenwriters is David Mamet under the pseudonym of Richard Weisz (apparently he refuses to share credit under his …
Subaqueous computer animation; or, Finding Nemo's Sunken Treasure. Not only is the plasticky animation done by computer, but also the plotting, scripting, casting, everything. We have here, plugged in as variables in the formula, hip-hop fish (voice, and lips, of Will Smith), Mafia sharks (voice and facial mole of Robert …
Genial spoof, too innocuous and lazy-minded to be construed as satire, of "reality television." A no-nonsense LAPD detective, in the departmental doghouse after putting a bullet in a TV news camera ("He's Dirty Harry, he's real ... and we've got him by the balls"), is compelled to co-operate on a …
David O. Russell needs to leave Philadelphia almost as much as John Woo needs to stay in Hong Kong. For his follow-up to The Fighter, Russell once again takes the low road in search of truth and beauty amidst a group of boorish louts with personalities akin to the cast …
Lorenzo Carcaterra's best-selling revenge tale, obligingly but dubiously filed on the nonfiction bookshelves, of a quartet of Hell's Kitchen hellions who are sent together to the Wilkenson Home for Boys, are routinely beaten, tortured, and sexually abused by a quartet of Gestapo-esque guards, and then -- with The Count of …
He's an illiterate loner (and eccentric inventor) and she's a widowed factory worker, in a blue-collar romance that winds up in white-collar wedlock: i.e., double happiness. Or double dippiness. Harriet Frank, Jr., and Irving Ravetch, veteran scriptwriters and card-carrying Hemophiliac Liberals, have polished the screenplay to a slippery slickness ("You …
Facetious fairy tale located in a magical kingdom within Merry Old England, populated by an ardent suitor, a grasping inamorata, a humanoid heavenly body, a stray unicorn, a wicked witch, a power-mad prince, a gallery of ghosts, a gay flying pirate (putting the fairy in fairy tale?), among others. The …
Amusing bouts of acting between Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, as a stodgy bottled-up parole officer and a jive-ass cornrowed convict. But shaky plotting — the prisoner’s hot-to-trot wife let loose to ply her girly wiles, more specifically Milla Jovovich’s small breasts, colossal nipples — and pretentious, ponderous religious …
The moviemakers, director Martin Scorsese and scriptwriter Paul Schrader, have started with an old-style Warner Brothers working-man premise and tried to cram their learning into it: existentialist philosophy from Sartre and Camus, homages to Bresson's Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest, lyrical sketches of New York After Dark styled …
Based on Tobias Wolff's memoir of his middle-to-late teen years, from the late Fifties to Sixty, during which period his footloose single mother settled down and remarried an auto mechanic in the ominously named small town of Concrete, Wa. (Wedding-night revelation: "You can get it doggy style or laying on …
Something to put in the right-hand column of your list of the pros and cons of adoption: the possibility that the biological parents might be homicidal maniacs and want to regain custody. Wesley Strick, who wrote the remake of Cape Fear, mines the same vein in his directing debut (implement …
Unintelligible rendition of the John Gregory Dunne novel: unintelligible in such small matters as what's being said at any particular moment, as well as in the larger scheme of things. Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro, both acting on automatic pilot, portray Irish-American brothers, the former a cop and the …
Kevin Costner comes off as a bit preppy, a bit wimpy, for the role of Treasury agent Eliot Ness. Maybe he's meant to start out that way, and then gain in stature, but all he gains instead is in number of low camera angles to give him an appearance of …