Little film about little people in a little town. More exactly, a hash-slinging single mother with two teenage daughters in a trailer park in Laramie, New Mexico. You know it's serious because of the in-jokes: writer-director Allison Anders, minus one "l," is the signee of a stern note from the …
David Mamet's Broadway prize-winner, with something approximating a dream cast: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and briefly, bringing in an expensively scented whiff of prosperity, Alec Baldwin. All men, no women. The first five of them play, respectively, the preening tomcat, the drowning rat, the …
Unsavory documentary by Australian filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke (on the rebound, we are told with doubtful relevancy, from a broken marriage) about a Thai prostitute called Aoi (trans., Sugar Cane), who is promised a rice farm in payment. The core of the movie, though spread throughout, consists of soul-baring, self-pitying interviews …
The mousy librarian, neglected by her policeman husband, gets his attention by claiming credit for the murder in the love-nest motel: "Maybe she reads too much." Director Allan Moyle really bears down on the menace and violence (a Cajun-accented William Forsythe), and doesn't ease up much on the comedy. Such …
Curtis Hanson (Bedroom Window, Bad Influence), availing himself again of the Hitchcockian formula of ruffled complacency, develops the creepy situation of a happy family infiltrated by an undeclared enemy with an undisclosed (even to us) plan of action. To get into that situation, as into many another fruitful suspense situation, …
More comic book than dime novel, and more comic book than movie, too. And not all that hard-boiled, for that matter. The opening gun battle attains a body count beyond the capacity of all your fingers and toes, and sets up a recurring pattern of marksmanship whereby incredible accuracy alternates …
Cub reporter (and intrepid Gothic heroine) is hankering after a hot story when she witnesses a man explode on a hospital gurney, with electrified chains standing straight out from his body. Surely there must be a story there. Not much of a one, as it turns out, but a lot …
A not neat union of Capra sentiment and Preston Sturges satire, the prime targets of which are the media and the fame game. A petty crook, on the eve of his incarceration, foot-draggingly saves fifty-four passengers trapped in a downed airplane, and then skulks off into the night. An imposter …
A small-town trumpet-playing barber and a runaway rock-'n'-roll roadie transport a drug-stuffed cadaver from Canada to New Orleans, pursued by a greasy Mephistopheles. Would-be off-center comedy is more truthfully altogether off the map -- despite the large amount of geographical exactitude (the boyhood home of Bob Dylan, etc.). With Don …
Ten-ton commemorative monument, forged by Danny DeVito out of swooping cranes and swelling adagios and a two-thirds empty widescreen -- as puffed-up and stiff as the body of Jack Nicholson in the title role. (What would you say, doctor? Napoleonic overcompensation on the part of a diminutive director?) Still, the …
All right, okay, fair enough: Kevin again gets separated from the McCallister clan at Christmas (they get on the plane to Miami; he follows the wrong trenchcoat onto a plane to New York). But then he again runs into the same two thieves (escaped from prison and a long way …
Logical followup to, and inversion of, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids -- though inevitably less inspired. The two-year-old newcomer to the Szalinski clan gets in the way of a matter-enlarging experiment, and starts to grow by leaps and bounds. ("Your son's escaped, and he's over fifty feet tall!" "That's impossible. …
Writer and director Andrew Bergman (So Fine, The Freshman) will go a long way for a gag -- and a planeload of skydiving Elvis impersonators en route to a convention of their brethren in Las Vegas may fairly be described as "far-out." But Bergman can be oddly plodding about getting …
What did John Lennon and the Beatles' homosexual manager Brian Epstein really get up to on those four days of R&R; in Barcelona in the spring of 1963? Smoked a lot of cigarettes, played a spot of cards, went to Bergman's The Silence, strolled in the park, visited a gay …