Fun for any age, except perhaps the teen one excessively concerned to be "with it." It may be that the accidental reduction of four children to the size of "boogers," and the inadvertent depositing of them in a plastic trash bag in the backyard, could be seen by the cultured …
Pressures of college application, turned up to a decently comic intensity. The rules of the game are pretty loose: the nightmarish "interview" at which the prom queen cum foreign-exchange student cum class president finds herself to be an exact replica of girls from all across the country; or the cobwebs …
Writer and director Bruce Robinson has got himself so worked up about advertising, much as Paddy Chayefksy got himself about television (Network), that he has taken leave of many of his senses -- particularly his sense of humor. Though he fancies himself here to be "savagely" satirical, he's really just …
Vivid literalization of that magical process whereby a book "comes to life." (The book in question "makes Stephen King read like Mother Goose," so you might better say it "comes to death.") Clever enough, but a bit overly drawn out, especially after it abandons the Fifties period of the book …
The topic of Open Adoption (that's where the adoptive parents meet the biological mother during pregnancy, and each side gets to approve the other), considered from as many angles as possible in one single case, or anyhow from as many angles as necessary when all parties are as honorable and …
A post-Vietnam warm-over, never brought to a level much warmer than luke. The now teenage daughter of a wartime casualty wants to find out what all the shooting was for. Her unemployed uncle, and very permissive guardian, would seem to have some of the answers -- he and his fellow …
The third Indiana Jones adventure, and more or less what you'd expect. Perhaps a little less, in that this is the most blithely comical of them, with the hero's father filling the bill of comic-relief character actor. Of course we hardly needed any added relief in what is already an …
A masochistic movie. Your typical Dedicated Professional, Supportive Husband, and Drop-Dead Adonis is visited by a waking nightmare of crooked cops and twisted cons. A real nail-biter for those who regard Tom Selleck as they would a son. (Will that nasty cut on his cheek ever heal?) A real thumb-sucker …
Stage play in close-up (Stephen Metcalfe's Strange Snow -- and whoever retitled it gets an "F" in spelling), about a reunion of two Vietnam vets and the interest one of them takes in the other one's sister. (It's a different-worlds romance, joining the worlds of the grease monkey and the …
Manhattan murder mystery with a grabbing start, and then a lot of grip-loosening for romantic dalliance and comic doodles. The mystery itself, when intermittently remembered, never regains its hold: the "special investigator" on the case goes way beyond the normal eccentricity allowed a Great Detective ("He's a fuckin' beatnik! He's …
Walter Hill has tended to be most inspired and inspiring when prowling the boundaries of film genres, knocking down a section of fence, burrowing an underground tunnel between them, establishing fuzzy communication by means of two tin cans and a string. In Johnny Handsome, a fable about a small-time criminal …
Studio Ghibli anime master Hayao Miyazaki's story of a girl's adventures in figuring out how to be a good witch.
Pronounced "for-BID-'n SUB-jects." The ninth joint effort of Charles Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson is an improvement over their norm only marginally. If that. For one thing, Bronson either has undergone some fine-tuning of his latest face-lift or else is overdue for his next one, but in any case …
True story of the "nonpermissive" -- some would say "fascist" -- New Jersey high-school principal, Joe Clark, whose tough anti-drug stance is backed up with a Louisville Slugger. Morgan Freeman, a fine actor fully capable of playing a human being, is engaged instead to play an unqualified hero figure, a …