Medium-cute romantic comedy about a marriage of convenience. He wants a green card in America. She wants a greenhouse in an apartment for marrieds. They then go their separate ways, the INS takes a closer look, they have to get back together, get their stories straight, get to know one …
The New Botch, hadn't we better say? These ones are not meaner, but somehow, stomach-turningly uglier, once they get into a genetics lab (Splice o' Life, Designer Genes) and begin crossbreeding with vegetables and spiders and whatnot. And they've moved on from small town to Big Apple, specifically to the …
Atavistic film noir adapted from one of Jim Thompson's posthumously fashionable spit-and-chewing-gum jobs. The adapters (Stephen Frears, director; Donald Westlake, writer) have done well to eliminate a shockingly sentimental streak in the book, but in doing so they have further downshifted an already driftless plot. And the intermittent digressive flashback, …
Horror story about the violation of Yuppie Paradise: a canyon home once featured in Architectural Digest, an advertising husband and a designing wife, and a little bundle of joy called Jake. The violator, making the nameless governess in Turn of the Screw look like Mary Poppins, is an English nanny …
An uphill battle, gamely fought. Franco Zeffirelli, using a (for him) subdued palette, is certainly a more cinematic director than, for a close-by example, Kenneth Branagh in Henry V. So much so that if the sound were to be switched off, the remaining picture would appear to be a truebred …
Doris Lessing, Ursula LeGuin, Kate Wilhelm, and a few others notwithstanding, science fiction has always been lopsidedly a man's game. But anybody with cause to feel persecuted and paranoid will have cause to elaborate those feelings in speculative fiction. And The Handmaid's Tale, by the feminist (and "straight" novelist) Margaret …
After seven years in a coma, a bullet-riddled detective rises from the dead, looking a lot like Jesus Christ but thinking only of bloody vengeance. Steven Seagal handles a gun quite nicely, and his technique in hand-to-hand combat is fast and exciting. But his aura of coolness is about the …
Vision of the future, virtually unseeable amid the monochrome, the shadows, the smoke, not to forget the mattress feathers. The story, about a junked robot who's incorporated into a metal sculpture and comes back to life, could hardly be plainer. With Stacey Travis and Dylan McDermott; written and directed by …
A money's-worth movie of broad scope, big cars, buttery talk, proud postures, and dubious purpose. The assumption appears to be that everyone will have missed Richard Lester's Cuba (1979) or else that anyone who did catch it didn't like it well enough to remember it. As embarrassingly similar as these …
Bigoted white cop receives the transplanted heart of a dapper black attorney, is haunted by the dead man's ghost -- you can bet the house there'll be a play on the word "spook" -- and together they delve into a Capitol Hill cover-up. It's sort of a Thorne Smith with …
Something to tide over the jittery samurai junkie till his next big fix: the "legendary" battles between two powerful warlords (one dressing up his troops in black, the other in red) in 16th-century Japan. Confusingly elucidated, with little help from a narration spoken in English by (of all people) Stuart …
The familiar storyline of a woman's sexual awakening is apt to feel like a long slog to any spectator not as enchanted with the woman as is the director. Since the woman in question happens to be Anais Nin, the director in question, Philip Kaufman, can count himself a member …
Conspiracy thriller about English abuses of power in Northern Ireland, featuring a simple but effective strategy of establishing an almost documentary realism so that the viewer will be less disposed to doubt the undocumented allegations. There is a considerable presence of TV news cameras on screen, and a considerable imitation …
Underimagined fairy tale about the runt of the household who gets accidentally left behind when the family takes off for France, fends for himself, fends off burglars (à la Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs), grows, in short, into a little man. It might just have worked if the filmmakers had …
The story comes from an early-Fifties novel by Charles Williams, a dead ringer for any number of direct translations or approximate paraphrases of the works of James M. Cain: it's conventional, in other words, all the way, unless you can count having a wicked blonde and a demure brunette as …