True-crime story, out of New Zealand, about two early-adolescent schoolgirls who form an "unwholesome attachment" and who bludgeon one of their mothers to death when the two of them are about to be forcibly pried apart. Directed with enormous energy by Peter Jackson, of Dead-Alive fame or infamy, it is …
Extremely long (at almost three hours) basketball documentary, made to seem longer by the unfocussed video-transfer image. Generating plenty of sociological and human interest, if not cinematic, it tracks the high-school careers of two inner-city Chicago prospects, Arthur Agee and William Gates, and it runs into inherent drama ("With six …
Bille August's treatment of the Isabel Allende novel (with most of the "magical realism" weeded out) might almost be a treatment of a Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon novel: a glob of sentimental (i.e., universally accessible) Leftism about love across the class divide, the belated enlightenment of a stick-in-the-mud, hope …
Though this is as different from previous Coen brothers movies as all of those are different from each other, it nonetheless picks up the interest of Barton Fink in the issues of commercialism, success, popularity -- the whole American, and particularly Hollywooden, ethos. That earlier movie confused a lot of …
Another slice of the ethnic pie, this time the Bronx Puerto Rican section: a nuclear family of four, whose Poppy has just gone to jail for looting during a blackout, and whose Mommy wangles herself a job in the Latino music business. Newcomer Lauren Vélez, though temperate by comparison, could …
James L. Brooks's bow to popular opinion. His movie started out as a musical, and went barreling ahead as one, until it was tried out in front of preview audiences. Their resistance to it was such that all the musical numbers got thrown out, except for the one of the …
Star vehicle. More precisely, a bicycle built for two, and pedaled across two types of terrain, George Cukor's and Alfred Hitchcock's. To put it as dauntingly as possible: Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts, in the roles of rival reporters on a train-wreck story, are required to be Tracy and Hepburn …
An historical Unsolved Mystery worthy of Robert Stack and his trenchcoat. Among the papers of the deceased Ludwig van Beethoven is found a document bequeathing his entire estate to somebody identified solely as his Immortal Beloved. Who was she? Writer and director Bernard Rose (The Paperhouse, Candyman), utilizing a Citizen …
Matty Rich's group portrait of the black bourgeoisie in the 1970s -- no criminals, no musical stars, no athletes, just Afro hairdos, bell-bottoms, the funky chicken, etc. But the movie is not just devoid of poverty and violence, but of interest and subtlety as well. Which is to say it …
Personal problems of Beautiful People living the Good Life and planning a Dream House in the Trendy Northwest. A loose remake, and a hollow one, of the 1970 French film, The Things of Life. But where Claude Sautet had the dependable Michel Piccoli in the lead, Mark Rydell has Richard …
Say this much for Anne Rice: she takes her vampires seriously. Even religiously. Not, however, docilely. Neil Jordan's screen treatment of her cultish novel rummages through the received lore as though trying on skirts and blouses, deciding against this one and for that one, and branching out experimentally into unexplored …
Pauly Shore gets his head shaved. Insufficient punishment. With Lori Petty, David Alan Grier; directed by Daniel Petrie, Jr.
Fred Schepisi's loose and lagging companion to his Roxanne: slightly brainy, slightly barmy romantic comedies. In this one, Albert Einstein plays Cupid to his mathematician niece and a nice young auto mechanic conversant with cosmic questions by way of the sci-fi pulps. Walter Matthau, flanked by a trio of fellow …
A New York beat cop, having just spent his last dollar on his weekly Lotto ticket, and not wanting to stiff a waitress on her fifteen percent of two coffees, disdains the standard line ("Catch you later") and, in order to underscore his earnestness, goes through some laboriously written dialogue …