Canine reincarnation tale. A highway fatality is reborn in the fur of a Golden Retriever, who experiences vivid but fragmentary flashbacks to his past life. When he finds his way back to his former family, a Ghost-like situation seems to be in progress, with a dubious business partner moving in …
Billy Crystal shows us what the private life of an NBA referee might be like if the ref were like Billy: equal time for shtick and schmaltz. Debra Winger is too good for the material, but she has a hard time proving it; William Hickey, as her Kansas father, needs …
Four directors. Four cinematographers. Four editors. And four separate stories, spun out consecutively on New Year's Eve in the Hotel Mon Signor, threaded together with the twitchily inventive comic performance of Tim Roth as the gung-ho new bellhop. His is as much a full-body job as the bellboy of Jerry …
Flattering portrait of long-time Disney animators (from the Thirties into the Seventies) and longer-time friends, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. The filmmaker is Frank's son, Theodore, and the tone, somewhat lulling, is one of unquestioning veneration. Clips from their later work, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and …
Just when you thought the emotional turmoil had been smoothed out, the foster child finds out that his real mother is dead and that he has a half-brother coming to live with him ("It's called kinship care"). Then, flaunting the ideal of the nuclear family, Willy the Whale pays a …
Fluffy stuff about a multiphobic American, most particularly Francophobic American, pursuing her errant fiancé to Paris and the Riviera, and falling in step with a French -- Franch -- Fr-r-rahnsh -- thief. A charming, mustachioed one, but of course. You can see immediately where it is headed, and Lawrence Kasdan …
A no-laughs comedy (unless man-punching-woman and woman-headbutting-man can crack you up) in the Bertrand Blier mode. Which means it strives more for provocation than for humor and achieves more contrivance than either: trying out the various and self-negating possibilities in a ménage à trois composed of a philandering husband, a …
Labored oddity to do with the ungifted son (Oliver Platt) of a famous funnyman (Jerry Lewis), who, after bombing in Vegas, retreats to his boyhood home of Blackpool, England, searching for fresh material but instead discovering family skeletons. Director and co-writer Peter Chelsom puts his stamp on the proceedings with …
Cozy little movie regarding sibling rivalry in the music world. The title character is not the main character, but is instead the latter's sister (and a synonym for a state of grace, an unapproachable ideal, a pipe dream), a country/folk singer of Alison Krauss-like talent and integrity, with a devoted …
Barry Sonnenfeld's further popularization of Elmore Leonard's already popular novel, chronicling the comic adventures of a Miami mobster in the Hollywood film industry. Anything that was broad to begin with has only been broadened; anything dark or darkish has been lightened; anything semi-dry, sweetened. The plotting, transplanted more or less …
Mamoru Oshii's cult cyberpunk anime classic.
Two idealistic outcasts in the County Sheriff's Office, the first black deputy and the first female deputy (the cherub-faced Michael Boatman and the pixie-haired Lori Petty), pool forces to unmask police corruption, racism, sexism, the whole ball of wax. The churning, slow-going exposition works its way into a pretty jittery …
Glitzy gangster film from Japan: a Yakuza boss gets stuck up, and everybody gets shot. Lots of wide-angle lenses, pointed upwards, pointed downwards, for an inside-a-tent perspective; lots of gaudy colored lights; lots of liquid shadows. With all the attention to "style," it is oftentimes hard to follow what's happening …
Really more a Maxie movie. Goofy, his dad, is along only for generation-gap embarrassment. And so, really more a John Hughes movie than a Disney. Except for the songs: too many of them. Directed by Kevin Lima.