With the male bonding solidified in the first outing (and Mel Gibson's suicidal tendencies straightened out), all that's left for the sequel is male buddying -- casual, smug, exhibitionistic (even to the point of some James Bond-ian puns and wisecracks: "Nailed 'em both," announces Danny Glover to nobody but the …
Unpretentious feature debut of the much-decorated TV-ad director, Joe Pytka: a comedy about a day at the races, a once-in-a-lifetime day for a nickel-and-dime compulsive gambler. Richard Dreyfuss acts as if he could carry the movie all by himself, but in reality he gets a lot of help from a …
Bruce Weber’s documentary scrapbook on the life of jazz singer and trumpeter (and heart-throb) Chet Baker. The filmmaker (whose Broken Noses was about the boxer and Chet Baker look-alike, Andy Minsker) has a lot of material, some of it quite rare, but he hasn’t a lot of angles on it. …
The Tri-Oceanic Mining Corporation stumbles (literally) onto a sunken Russian ship and a buried experimental treasure: Homo aquaticus (part-Dracula, part-Body Snatcher, part-Alien, part-Creature from the Black Lagoon). Rudimentary monster movie, with a leisurely start and frantic finish. Peter Weller, Amanda Pays, Richard Crenna; directed by George P. Cosmatos.
Unprecedentedly sordid (and gory) James Bond caper, hardly a Bond caper at all, really more a Mike Hammer-ish private vendetta, and certainly not Her Majesty's official business: overthrowing a drug king in mythical Isthmus City. Shedding the espionage apparatus simply tends to expose our hero's parentage of the one-man-army genre. …
Rabid underdoggism in "the scariest, most fascinating sport on the face of the planet" -- namely, college debate; more namely, two freshmen from little Kenmont up against mighty Harvard, on national TV in front of the U.S. Supreme Court (topic: abortion). What passes as intellection ("I'd like to sum up …
A return (successful, not just attempted) to Disney's animated heyday, or close thereto. It's doubtful that, as pure animation, the standard reached by Snow White and Pinocchio will ever again be equalled by human hand. (Whatever standard might eventually be reached by computers can never be so impressive.) But nothing …
A return (successful, not just attempted) to Disney's animated heyday, or close thereto. It's doubtful that, as pure animation, the standard reached by Snow White and Pinocchio will ever again be equalled by human hand. (Whatever standard might eventually be reached by computers can never be so impressive.) But nothing …
Model prisoner vs. malformed warden. Some rugged action, subverted by unmanly supplications for pity. The cast (except, principally, Donald Sutherland's warden, trained at the Kafka School of Penology, with further studies at the De Sade Management Institute) is solid. An especially eye-catching turn by Tom Sizemore as the hero's toady …
A cute-baby comedy with a twist: the voice of Bruce Willis, that weak and easily strained instrument, supplies the inner thoughts of the infant, starting in the womb ("Hey! Yo! Let's get a little apple juice down here, huh?"). One cannot say with total certainty that it was absolutely impossible …
A Problem Picture about problem teenagers at an exclusive "behavioral modification" facility. Adam Horovitz, one of the musical Beastie Boys, looks well and moves well as the principal problem. Smirks well, that is, and swaggers well, something like a young Richard Gere -- young enough, in fact, that all of …
Sentimentally democratic baseball comedy, which imagines that a group of "has-beens and never-will-be's," assembled for the express purpose of finishing last and enabling the disenchanted team owner to re-locate from Cleveland to Miami, could nevertheless, without any Damn Yankees supernatural intervention, vie for the pennant. A sitcom cast of characters, …
Ordinary murder mystery benefitting considerably from the Jamaican locale, less considerably from some tricky direction, more considerably from a performance by Denzel Washington that approaches middle-period Poitier in warmth and charm. James Fox, Mimi Rogers, M. Emmet Walsh, Robert Townsend; directed by Carl Schenkel.
For a start, there's a hair-raising plane crash ahead of the opening credits. But your scalp is not unassailed after that. The detective work on the plane wreckage has its own kind of spookiness: Why did the co-pilot cry out that the passengers were already dead and burned before impact? …