Slow-moving, contrived, and (to make matters worse) obvious thriller about two powerless orphans (particularly the lightbulb-fragile Leelee Sobieski), their $4 million inheritance, and their scheming guardians. With Stellan Skarsgard, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern, Kathy Baker; directed by Daniel Sackheim.
The producer-director team of Merchant-Ivory (not to forget writer Jhabvala) return, seventeen years after The Bostonians and twenty-two after The Europeans, to Henry James. A maturer James, and a maturer Merchant-Ivory, too. Inasmuch as it's James, it is guaranteed to have a rich, loamy, fertile situation, a variation on the …
From Robert Altman, a pleasant if overlong divertissement that combines the British class-conscious social satire with the dark-and-stormy-night murder mystery: Evelyn Waugh meets Agatha Christie. In short, Altman hell: etiquette, decorum, hierarchy on the one side, and convention, formula, artifice on the other. However much the director might distance himself …
Inspired by actual events, the story tells of a select group of long-term convicts who take up gardening at a progressive English penitentiary, and take it all the way to the annual Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Life-affirming, strong-arming underdog stuff; equally soft-hearted and soft-headed; as cutesy-wootsy and cozy-wozy as …
Sequel to The Silence of the Lambs: long, slow, eventually revolting; less a fright film than an anguish film; somber, overinflated, operatic (it stresses the "grand" in Grand Guignol); no doubt a disappointment to people who actually wanted a sequel; of little interest to people who didn't. It could have …
A happier experience for the moviegoer than for the main characters. The most confident piece of work from Zhang Yimou since his creative and personal split from his star, Gong Li -- since, to be specific, Shanghai Triad in 1995 -- it is done in a masterly but never showy …
The children's book by J.K. Rowling, now a movie by Chris Columbus — maker of, among others, Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, Nine Months, Stepmom, and Bicentennial Man, chief rival of Steven Spielberg for his in-touchness with the Inner Child. No longer applicable, quite plainly, will be the …
Is the cute guy in the apartment across the way a Mr. Right or a psycho killer? (Will four fashion-model roommates be any help in finding out?) Old-hat romantic comedy, with a splash of "gross-out humor" for modernity. It lives or dies on the personal appeal of its stars, a …
Witless, long-winded comedy about a mother-daughter team of con artists named Conners. That's a sample. The seven-inch semi-erect penis that gets broken off a statue, twice, is another and another and another. Miles of cleavage (if that's how it's measured), though the fifty-one-year-old Sigourney Weaver can't keep pace with twenty-one …
Stephen King in a sentimental mood: the same coming-of-age cornfield as Stand by Me, with the same complement of goldie-oldies, but with a moderate supernatural element as well (a psychic upstairs boarder, hiding out from a shadowy army of "low men"). It's all pretty thin, though the dawning consciousness of …
Writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell adapts his own off-Broadway musical (songs by Stephen Trask), a voyage of self-acceptance for an East German immigrant and transsexual glam-rocker (or "transexual" according to a mock tabloid headline on display), with a botched sex-change operation that has left him a seventh of a man. The …
Relatively speaking, this has to be considered David Mamet's most commercial piece to date. Relative, that is, to one starring Joe Mantegna or William H. Macy. A cast headed by Gene Hackman and Danny DeVito, in addition to Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife), and Ricky Jay (a …
Visited by impure thoughts, a yeshiva student in Tel Aviv drops in at the Love Boat strip club, and within five minutes has fallen head over heels for "Sasha," a Ukrainian hooker. Tawdry tale with earnest intent, including a nod at Mideast politics. The male actors consistently come up short. …
A prosperous, emotionally remote gerontologist (Charles Berling) provides room and board for his indigent, estranged father (Michel Bouquet, looking very old, looking almost more like the old Laurence Olivier than like the younger Michel Bouquet), a French colonialist doctor expelled from Africa. Well-manicured domestic drama, sensitive, pensive, anguished, and quite …