The masked mass murderer is back (after sitting out number three), but Jamie Lee Curtis isn't. In fact Jamie Lee Curtis seems to have passed away, leaving a daughter named Jamie to be imperilled instead. An unworthy homage, this, to the erstwhile Scream Queen -- and it didn't have to …
Handsome but spiritually empty transcription of the Evelyn Waugh novel about spiritual emptiness: you'd have only the faintest idea there had been anything funny, much less satirical, about the original novel. Kristin Scott Thomas and Rupert Graves, however, manage to convey much of the right qualities in the roles of …
Klaus Maria Brandauer comes out of the WWI trenches with a head wound and telepathic powers, among them the ability to foresee the Third Reich. István Szabó, in his third film with Brandauer (after Mephisto and Colonel Redl), does not succeed in making this a screen subject, despite countless closeups …
New chapter in the Elvis myth: four days in 1972 when he was kidnapped by teenage rock-and-rollers in Ohio, was presented as a gift to one of their mothers (Tuesday Weld, who played opposite the real Presley in Wild in the Country, well cast as one of the King's loyalest …
Rock-video vision of Hell: or Surrealism for Simps. Clive Barker has yielded the director's chair to Tony Randel, with no discernible decline in quality: depth perception, that far down in the abyss, is a little difficult. With Ashley Laurence.
A somewhat different Chuck Norris: recurrent nightmares, expectant fatherhood, a comical swoon at the hospital reception desk, and modesty about his heroics (well, he's always been modest, but he is more boastful about it now). Not different enough, however. After all the psychological (and even mythical) buildup, the routine exhibition …
Comedy about the authentic and the fake, mainly as manifested among artists and their appreciators, on the island of Rhodes -- all very civilized and sophisticated, if a bit academically and yawningly so. (Somebody inevitably quips, "It's all Greek to me.") Chris Menges's imagery shows somewhat better attention to the …
Neil Jordan, unbending a bit after Mona Lisa and A Company of Wolves, defends a genuinely haunted Irish castle against capitalist American plans to transport it to Malibu as a theme park; or in other words, defends Old World values against New ones. ("No respectable ghost would ever live in …
A talking-horse comedy whose script is credited partly to Stephen Neigher: is this a joke? is anything here a joke? how can anyone tell? With Bob Goldthwait, Dabney Coleman, Virginia Madsen, and John Candy as the horse's voice; directed by Michael Dinner.
In its timing -- close on the heels of a most uncomplimentary biography by Albert Goldman -- this has the effect of a damage-control documentary, a straightforward tribute, not a probe, assembled from home movies, family photos, concert footage, newsreels, interviews (notably not with the other ex-Beatles), and assorted detritus. …
The cut-throat college recruitment of a star high-school quarterback (the undersized Anthony Michael Hall) is made-to-order for satire: an opportunity to show humanity at its worst, on an occasion when it matters little. But the all-thumbs moviemakers are nobody to be pointing any fingers. With Paul Gleason, Robert Downey, Jr., …
The chain-rattling spirit of The Golden Age of Television rattles on: a foursquare (or just plain square) presentation of the facts in the case of an East German refugee who hijacked a Polish airliner to fly to freedom. Can hijacking, even in a sympathetic cause, be condoned? Can hiding expository …
Or: "How to Have a Husband and a Lover without Having Any Responsibility in the Matter." A romantic fantasy-thriller that might have sprung from the pages of the Women's Slicks, complete with poetry readings, sudden gusts of wind, a honeymoon car crash, a brooding artist (rock singer Sting, whose experience …
An even flatter movie than state, with a capricious plotline about a cross-country freeloader who, after joining up with a criminal psychopath, robs a bank, saves a little girl from drowning, and falls in love with a haughty horsewoman. Matt Dillon, as the criminal, though doubtfully psychopathic, is believably not …
A head-first plunge into nostalgia -- nostalgia for times past (1962), for the American small town (somewhere called Willowpoint Falls), and especially for the sorts of ghost stories that were told prior to Poltergeist (without, that is, gobs and gobs of special effects and a whole menagerie of monsters). The …