Chuck Norris returns from clinical death to a new life as an undercover narc inside the mob. This means that Norris the actor gets to pretend, for a change, to be an s.o.b. Except in off hours when he is building model airplanes and befriending the neighboring black kid. Michael …
David Mamet, director and writer, describes an existential identity crisis under the guise of a hard-boiled policier. Such a thing could easily have turned pretentious if the plotting and scripting had been less nose-to-the-grindstone. To be more exact: the identity crisis is at no point extracurricular to the police work …
The first couple of tinted, misted shots aboard an aircraft carrier capture what was most ludicrous about Top Gun. But after the credits the grim business of joke-making goes into slave-driving mode. Best notion for a scene: the heavily foreshadowed death of one flyboy as he strides across the runway …
An espionage caper whose sequence of events is so cartoonishly absurd that we expect to find ourselves waking up in bed when it's over. We would then have no hesitation about characterizing the experience as a nightmare. Sample sequence: the ex-con cat-burglar hero (Bruce Willis, looking even more pleased with …
Adolescent bedtime story about a high-school low-achiever who, while on a European field trip with the French Club, is mistaken for a secret agent and, aided by a James Bondian arsenal of gadgets, meets every challenge. Sweet dreams! With Richard Grieco and Linda Hunt; directed by William Dear.
The beginnings of the great affair between pants-wearing, cigar-smoking George Sand (pseud.) and pasty-faced, consumptively coughing Frédéric Chopin (she falls in love with the music before she first catches sight of the man -- truly a Romantic notion). The largest chunk of the action is set at a gathering of …
Edna Ferber-esque epic about a French rubber baroness in colonial Indochina, her adopted native daughter, and the all-in-white, liquid-eyed Naval officer who enflames them both. Long, rubbishy, bombastically scored by Patrick Doyle, and increasingly engaging once we go into the lovers-on-the-run stretch. Many scenic marvels, not least the ageless Catherine …
Andrei Konchalovsky takes a refreshing route into darkest Russia -- via the unique experience of Stalin's personal film projectionist -- though he doesn't evade thereby the broadest irony and broadest pathos, not to mention the broadest acting and broadest Russian accent (Tom Hulce's). The screenings themselves (Duvivier's The Great Waltz …
Privileged access behind the scenes at the San Francisco Opera, where the focus is all on the lesser lights, the nameless members of the chorus. These are engaging enough in interviews (if sometimes insufferably theatrical), and the casual glimpses of them -- playing poker and pingpong in full makeup backstage …
Rashomon replanted in a depressed Pennsylvania steel town and transformed into a conventional mystery told in flashbacks: Who popped the Japanese entrepreneur and why? Not much interest there, but some potent images of America-the-Dilapidated. Jeff Fahey, Bridget Fonda, Hiroaki Murakami; directed by Hiroaki Yoshida.
The size of this is beyond me, comments New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the course of his probe into the Kennedy assassination. And to the extent that writer-director Oliver Stone identifies himself with his lone-voice hero, truer words were never spoken. Essentially the movie is simply a remake …
Spike Lee's heated discussion of interracial romance is engaging enough on the level of a TV talk show (a girl-talk session of black women itemizing the shortcomings of black men could be transplanted bodily to The Oprah Winfrey Show), but not on the level of fiction. The most glaring problem …
Wouldn't it be a riot if an American rube were installed on the English throne? Well, maybe if the moviemaker had any skill at fomenting a riot. Had, for a start, a plausible premise for one. What this moviemaker has is simply the Pygmalion story with an unprecedentedly thick pupil. …