Sydney Pollack, back in the paranoia racket of Three Days of the Condor, of mysterious many-tentacled forces and vast invisible conspiracies, offers an au courant variation on the myth of the yuppie dream gone bad. And in this case, as in so many others, made right again by yuppie gumption. …
An arty exercise in American Gothic: the Texas motels, bars, coffee shops, etc., on the rounds of a vending-machine supplier (Dennis Quaid) who picks up, and takes with him, a part-time bachelor-party entertainer (Meg Ryan). The many-years-earlier prologue has a highly charged atmosphere of menace, and a couple of later …
Magicianly concierge, nonchalantly well played by Michael J. Fox, hankers after a hotel of his own, as well as after the mistress of his financial backer. Facile comedy, fleet afoot, snappy in patter, but never all the way to funny. With Gabrielle Anwar, Anthony Higgins, and Michael Tucker; directed by …
Futuristic prison film: a thirty-three-story underground edifice in the desert, with behavioral-control devices implanted in the inmates' stomachs. (Hence the new verb, to intestinate, a term that means to cause a tummy ache as well as to blow a hole through.) The primary prisoners -- Christopher Lambert (for the European …
Effective sentimental piece, and anti-advertisement for aquatic theme parks, about the bond between a troublesome foster child (despite super-cool foster parents) and a captive killer whale. The dialogue is often disarmingly simple-minded ("You saved my life," the towhead says to his 7000-pound pal, after spitting up water and regaining consciousness …
Big-screen treatment of the 1963-67 television series of the same name. The original was something special: existentialism for the masses; Swanson Frozen Kafka; an installment-plan Odyssey (or: The Longest Distance Between Two Points). And David Janssen, an actor of the narrowest range, had in Dr. Richard Kimble, innocent man on …
Tchaikovsky's, too, of course, and the New York City Ballet's, and director Emile Ardolino's, in addition to the late choreographer Balanchine's. As a piece of dancing (excepting "guest star" Macaulay Culkin, who can barely walk), it is much preferable to Carroll Ballard's 1986 version with the Pacific Northwest Ballet (sets …
Trust Walter Hill, a nose-to-the-grindstone action director, to resist the lure of the Big Theme. Of course you can, if you really want to, hear some echoes of the Vietnam War (best traceable to co-scriptwriter John Milius) in the futile and costly pursuit of indigenous guerrillas. And there are some …
Take-it-on-faith premise: a power surge transports a dying homicidal maniac into an afterlife as a computer virus. A horror film, all right, especially for anyone not wild about computer animation. With Karen Allen and Chris Mulkey; directed by Rachel Talalay.
Little froggy-eyed Elijah Wood has just lost his mother, and to make matters worse has to go stay with relatives during his father's two-week business trip. What's worse about that is that raspberry-lipped little Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone, Home Alone 2), in the part of Wood's cousin, is attempting to …
One week behind the scenes of a daytime TV series, The Love Judge. "Campy trash," proclaims the show's producer in assessment of a script on circus lesbians. (The script goes in front of the cameras, anyway.) The description applies to the low-low-low-low-budget movie, too, notwithstanding some pit stops to ruminate …
A going-through-the-motions Pittsburgh weatherman (Bill Murray, letting plenty of antipopulist snarl and sneer show through), covering the annual Groundhog Festival for the fourth consecutive year in rustic Punxsutawney, Pa., is obliged by an unforecast blizzard to spend another night in the same damn bed-and-breakfast. He wakes up the next day …
A going-through-the-motions Pittsburgh weatherman (Bill Murray, letting plenty of antipopulist snarl and sneer show through), covering the annual Groundhog Festival for the fourth consecutive year in rustic Punxsutawney, Pa., is obliged by an unforecast blizzard to spend another night in the same damn bed-and-breakfast. He wakes up the next day …
Not so much a title as a "pitch." Lemmon, Matthau, together again, as a couple of post-retirement Minnesota ice fishermen who have been wrangling with one another for fifty-five years ("Moron!" "Putz!") and are wrangling now over the new widow on their block (Ann-Margret, not acting her age, but, in …