Reasonable facsimile of comic sophistication: a thirty-something housewife, still fantasizing about the high-school football hero whom she never went as far as sleeping with, sends her best single girlfriend on a romantic reconnaissance mission, and very soon lives to regret it. The essential middle-class propriety of the thing withstands some …
As there seems to be no way to avoid saying, this is a This Is Spinal Tap for rap. The different musical form ensures a degree of difference, of course; and, as with the heavy metal of the earlier movie, detesters of such music will find no less to enjoy, …
Jackie Chan ("This guy can move like a monkey!") and his weapons of convenience: folding table, aluminum ladder, broom, umbrellas, stilts. A cheerful and cheesy James Bond spoof -- ski chase from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, man-eating shark and underwater combat from Thunderball -- that takes our likable hero …
Live-action (and Industrial Light and Magic) blow-up of the crudely drawn TV cartoon show, from Hanna-Barbera, set in suburbia, 2,000,000 B.C. The actors affect a 1950s sitcom, or 1930s vaudeville, style of performance: purposely primitive. And the dialogue strives for the cheerfully cornball: "What's his name?" "Bamm-Bamm." "Is that short …
Three decades in the life of a mental midget (I.Q., 75) who leaves giant footprints on his twisting path, in rather sharp contradiction of the feather-on-the-wind visual motif at movie's beginning and end. The traversal of so much history permits the filmmaker, Robert Zemeckis, to resume his wrong-end-of-the-telescope examination of …
A cinematic concerto grosso, with a fixed group of friends passing through four distinct high-spirited movements and one grave one. There's a lot we don't learn about these people; and crude and overdone comic writing mingles freely, but not spoilingly, with deft and funny stuff: "When you work in a …
In basic outline a conventional thriller about drug dealings in Brooklyn, but renovated almost to a condition of like-new. Screenwriter Boaz Yakin (of Clint Eastwood's The Rookie), here making his directorial debut, has bright ideas about virtually everything, some of them studied or showoffy, but none of them sloppy or …
Roger Donaldson's remake of the Jim Thompson pulp novel stays pretty close to the Peckinpah version, moves no closer to Thompson. (Does Walter Hill receive co-screenwriting credit for new work or for the same old yellowed 1972 script?) The movie replicates the Peckinpah even to the extent of its use …
Macaulay Culkin foils felons again. The eleven-year-old towhead (wet look) is dropped off with his ex-con father by his newlywed aunt (Kathleen Wilhoite, colorful cameo), and, in addition to gumming up a rare-coin heist, he does more in three days to rehabilitate the old man than Folsom Prison did in …
Story of a man who, in the words of the narrator, "transformed himself into an angel." The man, a White Devil at the outset, is an FBI agent who successfully frames a Chinatown laundryman during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, and who seeks forgiveness a decade later in …
British diplomatic follies in a newly independent African colony called Kinjanja. Smooth sailing along well-paved roads -- Evelyn Waugh Bouvelard, Joyce Cary Avenue -- with some lengthy dips into low comedy. Indeed the same director, Bruce Beresford, travelled much the same itinerary in Mister Johnson (and in the company of …
Jazz lover's orgy. The starting point is a group photograph of fifty-some jazzmen taken by Art Kane for Esquire at ten in the morning, or a little after, in front of a Harlem brownstone in 1958 (when filmmaker-to-be Robert Benton was the magazine's art director). From that hub emanate several …
Very mild comedy-drama (first one, then the other) about a former First Lady and current Prima Donna -- capricious, temperamental, a handful -- and the by-the-book Secret Serviceman assigned to bodyguard her. Nicolas Cage's natural oddness is somewhat straitjacketed in the part -- Nicolas Caged, you might say -- and …