A band of vampires, looking more like a heavy-metal band, is out for blood. Well, yes, what else? But in particular the blood of the nosy youth and the Hollywood has-been who dispatched the vampire in the previous Fright Night. Too many tricks and special effects by half (or by …
Odd choice of project for Randal Kleiser (Grease, Blue Lagoon, Big Top Pee-Wee), an adaptation of a very adult, very British novel about a heterosexual hairdresser still a virgin at thirty-one (and with nothing really "wrong" with him). The novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, has been allowed to write the script …
A not despicable reprise of the same material, juvenile yet jaded, profoundly lazy and lackadaisical, sufficiently disdainful, even, to aim an occasional joke over the heads of the rubes (something about "my Laura Antonelli tapes"). It is least despicable when least jaded and lazy: Rick Moranis's ineptness as a courtroom …
Erotic mystery about an old-fashioned (antique-dealing) English churchgoer bewitched by a dark German infidel: she sets the strings of his heart going, along with the strings of the philharmonic, on first sight. Neither the eroticism nor the mystery reaches anything near the pitch of a fever, maybe nearer that of …
A less familiar but immeasurably meaningful chapter of Civil War history, a sort of precursory case of affirmative action, to do with the formation of the first black fighting unit in the United States. The unprecedented and unrepeatable circumstances of this story are special enough, unique enough, to refreshen even …
Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis (Would-Be King of Rock-and-Roll) achieves the almost unbelievable: he overacts to an altitude above that of even Richard Gere as the Jerry Lee aficionado of Breathless. What these two movies have in common, besides Lewis's music, is director Jim McBride, which tells us something …
Inspiration for the callow, shallow dollar-chaser who wants to believe he can have great success and prestige and still be a smart-mouth and a screw-off along the way. Oh, and shoot some baskets too. The specific setting is med school, so there's particular inspiration for those whose total esteem for …
Michael Myers - he's back! Again! For revenge! But this time...he's a GIRL! No, just kidding. He's still a guy.
So now Eddie Murphy's a director and scriptwriter too, in a not very atmospheric conjuration of an after-hours gambling and prostitution house of the 1930s. The direction is plain and pedestrian, not at all flashy, but that fits in with the period. The script (ahead of which we always seem …
Hierarchical high-schoolers lampooned in a manner hardly more mature than that of the targets. This is certainly more than just another dead-teenager movie, although the plotline of serial murders (disguised as serial suicides) is, equally certainly, satire at its most sledgehammery. Occasional comparison comes to mind with the sadly unremembered …
Hierarchical high-schoolers lampooned in a manner hardly more mature than that of the targets. This is certainly more than just another dead-teenager movie, although the plotline of serial murders (disguised as serial suicides) is, equally certainly, satire at its most sledgehammery. Occasional comparison comes to mind with the sadly unremembered …
Teen romance in the Fifties, as revealed through movie and TV clips, newsreels, sex-education films, and present-day interviews. Many of the interviewees (very hip, in sharp contrast to the square archive footage) are too young to have done much dating and mating in the Fifties, so maybe the topic is …
The 28-year-old British Wunderkind Kenneth Branagh has dared to attempt to replicate Olivier's feat — his triple feat — of adapting, directing, and starring in a screen treatment of Part III of Shakespeare's "Prince Hal" trilogy, and has additionally dared to give it a completely new slant without doing undue …
The premise of a "blocked" crime novelist visiting actual courtrooms for story ideas and becoming involved in one of the cases personally is an acceptable place for a comedy-thriller to start -- or even, with minor alterations, for a "straight" thriller to start. Where it quickly stops being acceptable is …
Satire with a soft spot. Which, normally, is something about as useful as a Spalding baseball with a soft spot, something to be pitched into the trash can before the entire hide peels off. But High Hopes is nothing at all normal, and it would be foolish to let an …