An over-the-moon ode to Mother Love. A six-year-old girl, having lost her father on a Mayan pyramid, withdraws into her own little world, expressing herself through the plain-as-day symbol of a ceiling-high house of cards. Her mother, the to-hell-with-dieting Kathleen Turner, resists the diagnosis of "classic autistic features" put forth …
Hot-air fairy tale, from Argentina, about the irrepressible passion of a continental man of the world for a provincial fifteen-year-old midget. It has a thesis ("Love is blind," "Love is strange," something like that) but no convincing evidence. The Fellini-esque hints of the music (and of the participation of Marcello …
The edifying and entertaining spectacle (not in the ways intended) of Hollywood high rollers wrestling with a Moral Question. Here's the question: What if a perfect stranger were to offer a happily married couple a million dollars for one night with the wife? Or to put it another way: Does …
Alumni from the "golden age" of Camp Tamakwa (hence the corn oil poured over the image) gather for a reunion at the behest of their now-gray counselor, Uncle Lou. They have fun, expose their inner selves, experience black-and-white flashbacks, work out their problems, pile on the baloney. The use of …
Self-indulgence on a humble scale. Steven Antin, a seemingly unremarkable talent, has written a starring role for himself as a screenwriter surrounded by a cast of Fruit Loops. He gets little help from Jefery Levy's penny-pinching, energy-saving direction. With Patricia Arquette, Katherine Helmond, Sandra Bernhard, Martha Plimpton, and Tate Donovan.
The prospect of watching Clint Eastwood being annoyed, exasperated, disgusted by John Malkovich for an entire movie, and then foreseeably dusting him off at the end of it, certainly sounds like a reasonable evening's entertainment. You won't be much let down. Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent -- an acknowledged …
An open-and-shut case of miscarriage of justice, based on fact. (It might better be named In High Dudgeon.) A petty thief from Northern Ireland just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: Guildford, England, 1974, when a no-warning IRA bomb goes off in a crowded pub, …
Unleavened Irish whimsy about two motherless lads and a magical white horse, on the run from civilization (etc.). The puckered-faced kids are all right, but the horse doesn't seem magical so much as the beneficiary of discreet and protective editing. Gabriel Byrne is the drunken Da, and Ellen Barkin turns …
Eighty-some minutes of martial-arts inanity, an earlier, unearthed directorial effort by the fight choreographer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Yuen Wo Ping. No doubt we have the Ang Lee film to thank (if so inclined) for its exhumation, and perhaps also for its wide release with English subtitles in place …
A documentary on a documentary: Orson Welles's "lost" Latin American project, begun during wartime in a Good Neighbor spirit, and terminated, prematurely, after a change in command at RKO Studios. As told through interviews with participants and Miguel Ferrer's narration, it makes an interesting story -- not an interesting movie. …
Brusquely, bluntly, brutally "sensitive" film about a boy awakening to the existence of Real Monsters. A road-repair crew has put up "Danger" signs in front of the house; a pack of snarling dogs patrols the back; but mainly there's the gimp-legged neighbor nicknamed "the Zombie," who turns out to be …
Spanish sex comedy of constant provocation but no clear point. Bigas Luna, an even badder boy than his compatriot Almodóvar (and badder for a longer a period of time), has an eye for the sensual, the surreal, and the symbolic, as well as for the bleakest landscape and the gaudiest …
Brothers become buddies. Two runaways from a broken home head for asylum in Canada. The elder, Josh, has convinced the younger, Sam, that his name is an acronym for Strategically Altered Mutant, and that he's about to be sent off to a secret war in Africa as a child warrior. …
Boys' night out becomes boys' nightmare out, when they take a wrong turn en route to the boxing match and witness a gangland killing. An action film in the Walter Hill mold, a sort of combination of Trespass and The Warriors, but reduced even further: a Walter Hillock, if you …
Spielberg. Dinosaurs. What more need be said? You get what you expect. Or in blurb-ese: "It delivers the goods." But it nowhere exceeds or confounds expectations. The premise, from the Michael Crichton novel, is essentially that of Crichton's Westworld with dinosaurs in lieu of robots: amusement park gone haywire. And …