Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation -- or "palimpsest," as he prefers to call it -- of what must surely be one of the most unread, or partially read, of contemporary best-sellers, Umberto Eco's murder mystery set in a 14th-century Benedictine abbey. The mystery element, minus most of the linguistic and historical and …
The free spirit of Buckeye Basin, a bit off balance ever since she was dumped by her boyfriend in mid-pregnancy, and habitually gussied up in the style of either an outdated flower child or a premature bag lady, finds a kindred spirit in a theatrical touring company out of Los …
The emergency-room patient, who looks like a derelict but turns out to be an anthropologist, is bleeding profusely and babbling in French. Before he expires, he infects the attending physician, so to speak, with his most recent memories. These are an awful legacy. The man has encountered something far more …
Outsider penetrates strange new environment on dangerous mission. Now fill in the blanks. Outsider: tough Chicago cop. Strange new environment: New Orleans and Cajun suburbs. Dangerous mission: to avenge his partner's evisceration. The details (a tattoo of a blue parrot on the mystery woman's shoulder, a ponytail on the villain, …
Ambitious seriocomedy about the father-son relationship of a diabetic Willy Loman and an ad-agency whiz kid. (Ambitious, at least, for the TV mentality of director Garry Marshall.) The "live" presentation of a possible TV spot to a potential airline client is charming, or anyway the woman on guitar is charming. …
Carroll Ballard has had to work very hard in order to create the illusion for brief moments that Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (not to be confused with nutcracker: the kitchen implement) is something more or other than it is. And even so he has had to sit back for long …
Cops and extracurricular ballet (with Jacques D'Amboise in an autobiographical role as the public-service choreographer). One of the cops is actually an imposter who really works in the job made famous in Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now: librarian on roller skates. Keeping the imposture going for the …
Two graduates of Generic High School spend the summer on Nantucket Island — meet girls, run afoul of the local capitalist pigs, challenge them in the big regatta, etc. The standard youth-comedy agenda, but a bit more detailed, more deviant, more mordant (e.g., the chain-smoking recluse who keeps a 24-hour …
Exasperating obstacle course of mistaken identity, incredible coincidence, and Ugly Americanism (albeit in a blissfully pretty package: Sigourney Weaver). An enthusiasm for archaeology at any rate affords a new source of cuteness for Gerard Depardieu -- though an old one, of course, for Cary Grant. Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the radio …
Purplish rendition of the Verdi opera, so deeply so as to produce many more chuckles than normal for this old tale. Nearest to an outright guffaw: the vision of the "dreaming" Cassio, with his naked torso toasted in orange and blue lights. Placido Domingo doesn't look too ridiculous in blackface; …
An Iowa farm boy goes to California and grabs the wrong bag from Baggage Pick-Up at LAX. This, as you would guess, and rightly nine times out of ten, is full of drugs. (It never would have happened at Cedar Rapids Municipal.) Of course you have to wonder why a …
Small, tidy, independent first film by Bill Sherwood, on gay life in New York City, and in a rather arty and intellectual circle to boot. Michael, a would-be writer and reluctant editor, has a thriving relationship with Robert (tickling one another's ribs, fencing with umbrellas). But Robert has arranged a …
And then she had two children, and she turned forty, and her husband cheated on her, and now, in the present tense, she attends her Twenty-Five-Year Class Reunion, passes out under the weight of the Prom Queen crown, and wakes up in the middle of Blood Drive, 1960, with a …
Yo-ho-ho, yes. Ho-ho-ho, no. The Spanish galleon, with its elaborate carved figurehead, is magnificent, and the costumes are splendid, and the production overall is grittily detailed. But none of this has a lightening effect. (Nor does Walter Matthau's woozily unreliable Cockney accent.) At times -- such as during the rat-eating …
It is only natural to find something a little behind-times about a front-line Vietnam movie of 1986, just as one would have done about a tub-thumping World War II movie like Darby's Rangers in 1959. And for all of writer-director Oliver Stone's credentials as a Vietnam veteran himself, the sense …