Matrimonial, as opposed to occupational, 9 to 5, with three high-wattage actresses exacting rah-rah revenge on the husbands who dumped them for younger women. The tripartite story -- an old, old, old story, too -- requires some laborious exposition and development. Each of the stars -- Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, …
Matrimonial, as opposed to occupational, 9 to 5, with three high-wattage actresses exacting rah-rah revenge on the husbands who dumped them for younger women. The tripartite story -- an old, old, old story, too -- requires some laborious exposition and development. Each of the stars -- Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, …
Run-of-the-mill chase film about two fugitives from a Georgia chain gang (black and white, fettered together very remotely like The Defiant Ones), dodging not just local authorities but Cuban mafiosi and a corrupt fed. Played with more commitment than warranted by Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin, and most of all …
A boy and his dolphin. Or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation (in the Florida Keys with My Beach-Bum Uncle). Getting seasick. Getting cigarsick. Getting attacked by an environmental polluter and a hammerhead shark. Getting friendly with a cute little blonde. Same pattern as Free Willy and its sequel, with …
This is perhaps, just barely, recognizable as the work of the Spanking the Monkey man, if not for its gerundial title, then for its morbid fascination with family dysfunction. David O. Russell's move into or toward the commercial mainstream, though, has meant an accelerated, assembly-line manufacture of jokes, and damn …
Traditional women's film (mirrors, flowers, telephones, etc.), with a big-boned Joan Crawfordy performance by Marisa Paredes as a pseudonymous romance novelist in marital turmoil. Naughty boy Pedro Almodóvar is on his best behavior, curbing his normal tendency toward outrage, but not his tendency toward tedium. A couple of brief flamenco …
True-life adventure of Canadian artist-inventor Bill Lishman, who figures out how to guide an orphan flock of geese to a migratory paradise in North Carolina. For a children's film, it's made with uncommon care (by Carroll Ballard, of The Black Stallion), even if much of that care comes down to …
Stranger in town: the long-legged, short-haired, fat-lipped Angelina Jolie, introduced on screen, to the whistling and stomping of rain and thunder, in anatomical stages, working upwards from the toes of the boots. "Just passing through," as she laconically puts it, after getting thrown out of school "for thinking for myself," …
Skynyrd! Over three hours of Skynyrd! The makers of every crap-pop country song that wants to the band in order to gain a little cred (they tend to do the same thing to Hank Williams) should be made to watch this before going into the studio.
A rub-our-noses-in-it descent into the low life, in the company of a runaway teen. There are some laughs along the way, thanks in large part to the force-of-nature resilience of Reese Witherspoon as the plucky heroine, and thanks in no part to writer-director Matthew Bright's self-congratulation on the strength of …
The behind-the-scenes presence of Peter Jackson, the New Zealander responsible for the highly respectable Heavenly Creatures and before that the deliberately disreputable Dead-Alive, adds a degree of interest to this ghost tale, even if some of that interest must take the form of dismay. His direction is incontestably high in …
An early screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's, disinterred and refurbished for his friend and colleague Robert Rodriguez to direct, and for himself to act in (amateurishly, as always, but with thoroughly aroused senses of fun and enthusiasm). The pre-credits scene exhibits some genuine movie sense. An extended bit of fat-chewing between …
A pre-credits clip of The Petrified Forest sets the time and the social milieu for a slow, morose, brooding gangster film, riddled with Catholic torment and subliterate philosophizing. Abel Ferrara convinces you of his seriousness, as much by dullness as by anything else; and the endless flashbacks tax patience with …
Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf forms a perfect cyclical enclosure in which a Persian carpet begets a dreamlike folk tale that begat the carpet in the first place. The animistic world in which this unfolds is a similar enclosure: the sheep and goats of the nomadic clan, the grasslands around them, …
Spike Lee's first- anniversary commemoration of the (as it turned out) optimistically labelled Million Man March. It tells of one motley group of fifteen or so who travel together to Washington, D.C., aboard a chartered bus from South Central L.A., and conduct a sort of mobile open forum of views …