The reteaming of the writer and the director of Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, has produced no less madness but much more method. Or anyhow more meaning. Kaufman, playing fast and loose with the truth, evidently set out in reality (though it doesn't seem his sort of …
Black comedy for kids, specifically those too young to remember the mid-Sixties television sitcom of the same name. The pattern of inversions is simple to grasp -- the bouquet of rose stems with the blossoms snipped off, the children holding a TV antenna outdoors in a lightning storm -- and …
Monotony in nothing flat. The Addamses have a new addition (a mustachioed bundle of gloom named Pubert), and the two jealous older kids are packed off to summer camp, and the hired nanny is actually a black-widow serial killer who has set her cap for Uncle Fester. In the nanny …
Conscienceless romantic revenge comedy about a couple of rejected lovers who team up to spy on and sabotage the love nest of their respective exes. (The setting-up of a camera obscura as a surveillance device is a nice scene on purely technical grounds.) Meg Ryan, with punkish dark roots and …
A modern-day vampire tale with a rock-song soundtrack ("You're my sanctuary./ Baby, let me in./ You're my addiction"). Always a flexible metaphor, the blood-thirst in this instance is not just a synonym for drugs, as the title might imply, and as the hypodermic syringe bears out, but an all-purpose synonym …
A mondo-bizarro movie: spare, precise, neatnik images of uniformly loopy characters. ("I wanted to make a film," director Atom Egoyan has stated, "about believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way." Batting average: .333.) The title character is an insurance-claims adjuster who is worshipped as "an angel" at the …
An Atom Egoyan study in anguish — an Atom Egoyan specialty — and a symposium on terrorism, race, religion, other things, the fictional framework of which is too rickety to give support. Hair-raising camera angle on a fatal car accident, an outstanding few seconds. With Devon Bostick, Arsinée Khanjian, Scott …
Coming-of-age comedy with airs. Jesse Eisenberg for all intents and purposes plays an extension of his pretentious youth in The Squid and the Whale, a virginal egghead (“I read poetry for pleasure sometimes”) obliged to take a minimum-wage summer job at a Pittsburgh amusement park while awaiting admission to the …
A terrible embarrassment for anyone old enough not to be babysat. The terriblest moment: four suburban white kids improvising a blues version of the plot-so-far in front of a nightclub audience of glowering blacks. The peaks of excitement: the Crystals singing "Then He Kissed Me" at the very beginning and …
In this, as in Brazil before it, Terry Gilliam has again turned what would be a tale of wonder into a tale of wampum, and has managed at the same time to wrest maximum sympathy from the kibitzing Press. That may well be a more astounding trick than any of …
Insufferably hip piece of science fiction. The hero, an American-Japanese crossbreed, as his name would indicate, is a world-renowned neurosurgeon, part-time rock-and-roll musician, and, in his first screen adventure, explorer of the Eighth Dimension (i.e., inner space; i.e., the empty space inside solid matter). No wonder he is already celebrated …
Stand-up comic Andrew Dice Clay takes on a different identity -- that of "rock-and-roll detective" Ford Fairlane, a Sam Spade in the body of an Elvis impersonator -- but he takes along his same Brooklyn braggadocio. This gives a revitalizing new slant to the generic rudeness and smart-assiness of the …
The reputation of the Mark Twain novel is not so unimpugnable that it can afford an ally such as the Disney studio: stress on the affected folksiness and sentimentality (underscored by the Aaron Coplandisms of composer Bill Conti). With Elijah Wood, Courtney B. Vance, and Jason Robards; written and directed …
Among them, a battle with river rapids, a pinch from a crab, the defense of a chicken egg against an inquisitive hedgehog, and a ride on the back of a turtle. Milo, you understand, is a cat, Otis a dog. The biggest hardship either of them faces is a superslick …
Priscilla's just a bus; Mitzi, Felicia, and Bernadette are her passengers, two female impersonators and a transsexual (the gaunt Hugo Weaving, the muscle-bound Guy Pearce, and the grande damish Terence Stamp), who take their cabaret act out of the cosmopolitan security of Sydney and into the backward Outback. There's a …