Back-to-basics African adventure, Great White Hunter and all, founded on fact: two man-eating lions getting in the way of colonial "progress" -- a British railroad construction crew -- in the last years of the 19th Century. Scary; gory; gorgeously photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond; nicely varied sequences of tracking and stalking; …
Pious run-through of the third -- and finally successful -- prosecution of the white-supremacist assassin of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, thirty years after the crime. Director Rob Reiner likes to have his points spoken out loud, and though the speech is quieter here than usual (A Few Good Men, The …
The old story of the unimagined detours on the dreamt-of road to stardom. This particular detour, into the phone-sex business where acting and fantasizing talents do not go to waste, gets the Spike Lee treatment. Which of course includes the director's trademark shot of the stationary actor pushed or pulled …
If it was a movie, we'd have shot fifty people by now, trumpets one of the all-girl quartet of high-school seniors, soon reduced by suicide to a trio. "No, this ain't no movie." Agreed, although the thunk-ker-thunk-thunk-ker-thunk-thunk in the background sounds a lot like any and every youth movie, and …
High-contrast cop partners (white, black; New York, L.A.; Buddhist, cinephile) witlessly bantering and quipping their way along the trail of a twisted serial killer who would seem to have been overly impressed with Seven. Him, or his director, John Gray: it's dark; it rains a lot; the crime scenes are …
Hou Hsiao-hsien reimagines the gangster genre in the form of a Taiwanese slice of life, an anti-drama, an anti-melodrama, that eases, glides, sneaks into its moments of animosity and violence. Or better say slices of life, plural, to emphasize the unconnected, random, desultory quality. What passes for a narrative has …
Breezy cruise through twelve years of musical Memory Lane, 1958-70, and through the rocky shoals of backstage clichés. The characters are pseudonymous ("Denise Waverly" for Carole King, "Jay Phillips" for Brian Wilson, etc.), and the songs are pastiches, and both of these factors dampen the interest. Hair and clothing styles …
Sugary nostalgia piece, from an autobiographical Capote novel, set in the pre-WWII South. Sissy Spacek, incapable of dishonesty, is pinched and starchy in the unusual role (for her) of a small-town pillar, and Edward Furlong is his usual mope, but the rest of the cast -- Piper Laurie, Nell Carter, …
Boxing satire (think Holmes-Cooney, Tyson-McNeely, Creed-Balboa), at about the degree of polish of a Saturday Night Live sketch, and at about twelve times the length. Nowhere is the similarity to SNL greater than in the hardship of having to scare up a couple of "heavyweights" from a limited ensemble: the …
The Kenneth Branagh incarnation (blond like Olivier's). The prime selling point for this vulgarly overscaled remake of Shakespeare's revenge tragedy is that it presents for the first time on screen, at a length of four full hours, the uncondensed text, for which Branagh demonstrates his reverence by pouring buckets of …
Adam Sandler, a would-be hockey player who can't skate, brings his slap-shot skills (and brawling manners) to the professional golf circuit. Gag construction is workmanlike, and Dennis Dugan's directorial touch provides an occasional prod. (Highlight: a fistfight with hoary game-show host Bob Barker in the midst of a Pro-Am tournament.) …
Moderately eccentric children's film about a sixth-grader who is training herself to be a writer by jotting down her eagle-eyed observations in a notebook marked "PRIVATE." It's still interested in teaching worthwhile lessons ("The truth is important, but so are your friends"), but first it's interested in squirming around in …
The first big-screen treatment of one of the Lt. Dave "Streak" Robicheaux detective novels of James Lee Burke, shorn of much of his literary pretension. The image -- the proverbial picture that's worth a thousand words -- eliminates the need for all that knee-deep verbiage, all that slogging scrutiny of …
He who summons the magic, commands the magic. Unless he's a film director, and slave to special effects, whose name is removed from the credits and replaced by the fictitious "Alan Smithee." With Bruce Ramsay, Valentina Vargas, and (once again as Clive Barker's Pinhead) Doug Bradley.