A Pygmalion tale about a dirty-mouthed, drug-addicted, gang-enrolled Galatea who, after killing a cop, is drafted by a nebulous intelligence agency as a usefully malleable talent. Released back into society as a trained assassin, she embarks in her free time on a girlish romance with a grocery clerk, kept blissfully …
Hubert Selby's violent novel of Brooklyn low life in the early 1950s (gang violence, sexual violence, labor violence, domestic violence -- da woiks!), brought to the screen decades too late, and by a foreign director (Uli Edel) to heighten the alienness, and grotesqueness, and squalidness, and luridness, and garishness, and …
Clichés from the clean-cops-dirty-feds stockpile, dished out in comic-strip dialogue ("Fuck the backup! Let's go!" and "Hey, what's that dirt-bag Fast Eddie doin' here?"). Some good L.A. locations captured by Brit director John Mackenzie. With Brian Dennehy, Joe Pantoliano, Jeff Fahey, and Deborra-Lee Furness (the tough Aussie biker of Shame).
An unusually constructed reconstruction of the life of the 19th-century French murderer, Lacenaire (the actual man on whom the foppish assassin in Children of Paradise was based). The movie takes us through his final day in prison and all the way past the guillotine before cracking open his memoirs and …
Female buddies from birth (or grade school at the very least), who moonlight as a once-a-week vocal trio in Atlantic City, and who are all made wackily individual without being made believable. One (Diane Keaton) maintains her father's TV memorabilia museum; another (Kathryn Grody) oversees the family taffy-making concern; the …
Bertrand Tavernier does what would have seemed improbable if not impossible. He goes at the First World War from a new angle, opens up a new area of experience: that of counting and identifying the corpses following the truce. This is a post-war war movie, a war movie with a …
Mischievous-teenager thriller, in the I Saw What You Did mode: mechanical, but well-built and well-operated, with gentle pressure on the gas pedal until finally flooring it at the climax. The perky teeny-boppers and the smiling psycho (known to the newspapers as "the Candlelight Killer") are straight out of cookie cutters, …
The spread of AIDS, in fiction form. The scope of the action stretches over the entire Eighties, starting on the day when mention of a mysterious "gay cancer" turned up on page twenty of the New York Times -- so that in the early stages of the movie the characters …
The bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, 1955; or more exactly, a microscopic fragment of it: "Fifty thousand boycotted the buses in Montgomery. I knew one. Odessa Carter." For a while the movie pursues the plan of attack of another race-relations movie in another area of the globe in another era …
Odd-couple cop comedy. Dan Aykroyd's bouts of ratiocination are somewhat remindful of classic detectives in the Ellery Queen and Sherlock Holmes mold. But those bouts are actually only one bout. (The second such bout is a joke.) His fits of split-personality — doing the voices of Popeye, Pee-wee Herman, the …
A second screen version of William (now Sir William) Golding's allegory about a group of schoolboys left to their own devices on an uninhabited island. This version, in contrast to the 1963 one, has American boys instead of British ones, and color instead of black-and-white, and references to ALF and …
Private-eye pastiche written and directed by Alan Rudolph, and seemingly a companion to his Choose Me and Trouble in Mind. The story is farcically promising -- the dick is tailing the wrong man, and is being tailed himself -- but it's cloaked in so much mood and atmosphere and attitude …
Steven Seagal, a DEA agent in need of R&R, returns to the white-bread suburb of his youth, and finds it overrun by Rastafarian dope peddlers (led by a green-eyed magic man called Screwface). He breaks a lot of bones, he chops off a head, he does what any man would …
An invasion of a billion aliens: human actors with green greasepaint on their faces and the personalities of the animated pests in a Raid commercial (e.g., buzzing around a Buddhist meditator with a leaf-blower). They manage thoroughly to annoy every human being on earth. Most particularly the attending moviegoer. Anita …