A full recital of misgivings about the casting would run the risk of descending to John Simon-esque rudeness. Let it suffice that John Malkovich is not altogether persuasive in the part of an infamous and irresistible roué that Michelle Pfeiffer is only slightly more persuasive as the demure embodiment of …
Cops and zombies, with a sense of humor that's supposed to be black but is really only dim. Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo are the plainclothes partners on the case, well paired for lantern jaws, though Williams can't match Piscopo's muscles, which the latter has obviously been working hard on …
Fitfully amusing Dirty Harry adventure (the fifth), with some vigorous digs at TV newscasters, film critics, heavy metal, and horror films (well, every film must feel superior to some other). The most sustained fit of amusement: a Bullitt-type chase scene over the hills of San Francisco, with the pursuer being …
With this, David Cronenberg comes very near to "straight" psychological drama, and -- excepting only one nightmare scene, from which the dreamer awakens before it becomes too disgusting -- gets quite far from his icky-gooey horror mode. And any horror aficionado who honors the name of Val Lewton (I Walked …
Bill Couturié's documentary compilation of archive footage and oral readings of letters from the Vietnam front lines. The only serious false notes in it -- the too discriminatingly hip selections of goldie-oldies are not seriously false -- are the suavely "professional" speaking voices of the narrators (Robert De Niro, Michael …
Twelve superbly drilled, highly financed, and heavily armed international terrorists find themselves overmatched against a vacationing New York cop in bare feet. The action, set almost entirely inside an L.A. skyscraper, is a pyrotechnical marvel. But the overriding marvel is how action so marvelous has come to seem, in the …
Twelve superbly drilled, highly financed, and heavily armed international terrorists find themselves overmatched against a vacationing New York cop in bare feet. The action, set almost entirely inside an L.A. skyscraper, is a pyrotechnical marvel. But the overriding marvel is how action so marvelous has come to seem, in the …
Steve Martin and Michael Caine take over the respective roles of Marlon Brando and David Niven in the 1964 flop, Bedtime Story: two con men preying on wealthy women on the Riviera. And they play them extremely broadly, to reassure the audience it's all in fun -- lethal in a …
Family album of barely moving snapshots of a working-class Liverpool household modelled on the director's own, in the period from the Blitz to the middle Fifties. But perhaps not so much an album exactly, since that implies a sense of order and chronology; more an old hatbox of photos fetched …
Three women named Cissie, three identically murdered husbands, a games-playing coroner who unsuccessfully woos each widow in turn (aged roughly from sixty down to twenty), a young boy who counts dead bodies of all species and sets off fireworks at their places of death, a hoop-skirted jump-roper who counts the …
John Sayles dredges up the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and offers a swallowable explanation for it: the penny-pinching, plantation-master practices of team owner Charles Comiskey, inappropriately nicknamed "Commie." From this explanation, as laid out in the book by Eliot Asinof, it is easy to see what must have appealed …
Vehicle for the décolleté horror-film hostess on Los Angeles television, a sort of cross between Vampira and Mae West (and maybe Joan Jett), with a broad streak of self-derision and, after all, a lot about herself to deride. It was unclear beforehand what she had ever done to deserve such …
Twenty-five years in the lives of the one-time "Gray Ghost" in the backfield of the LSU Sugar Bowl champs of 1955-56 and the same-time "Magnolia Queen," who subsequently married. Because the story is based on a novel by the eminent sportswriter Frank Deford, we might have hoped for a greater-than-usual …
Directorial debut of playwright and scenarist, plus actor and sex symbol, Sam Shepard. This inveterate snooper into family closets, or family laundry hampers and trash cans, has here travelled for that purpose to the home country of his real-life mate -- northern Minnesota and Jessica Lange respectively. Whatever fascinating secrets …