Car-theft ring (Porsches, exclusively), with more than normal character interest: the personal largesse and peacockery of the wealthy thrill-seeker behind the ring, the susceptibility to thrills of the undercover rookie cop -- and Randy Quaid is very good in the standard supporting role of harassed and harassing superior officer. The …
The second screen adaptation of Kenneth Fearing's suspense novel, The Big Clock. The first, cleverly called The Big Clock, was in 1948, and only a fool would want to invite comparisons with it. The fool responsible for the remake, Roger Donaldson, avoids these for a while, with forty-five minutes of …
Amy Madigan played a top professional soldier in Streets of Fire and pulled it off all right. But she can't be expected to pull it off without some help, and she is given only a hard time here, avenging her slaughtered husband, and protecting their catatonic tot, through some slushily …
The adjectival title can serve even better as an interjectional critique of the whole show. There is an interesting premise to do with an accused murderess who must fight against the best-meant advice of lawyers and parents in order to prove her mental competency to stand trial. But all initial …
Female buddy comedy, with rather extensive groundwork to establish the clashing characters of two would-be actresses, one (Shelley Long) a pampered and somewhat prissy blonde, with lots of proper classical training and no real experience, and the other (Bette Midler) a carrot-topped, brass-plated vulgarian with an actual professional credit in …
Instantaneously boring character chemistry: trucker Sylvester Stallone wants to become pals with the snotty son he has never known, starting on graduation day at military grammar school: "Sir, you're going to be a victim of cholesterol poisoning," and so on. There's also the boy's hospitalized mother (why does she suddenly …
You can make out the skeleton of a typical youth comedy, centered around an inveterate skirt-chaser thrown for a loop by a droll redhead who says yes on the first afternoon in the front seat of the Camaro and then says no thereafter. This is firstly a James Toback film, …
An Odd Couple on the road, prissy Steve Martin and slobby John Candy. Writer and director John Hughes gets to tell some travel horror stories he didn't tell as only the writer of the two National Lampoon's Vacations. Broad, of course, but not as much so as you expect of …
An Odd Couple on the road, prissy Steve Martin and slobby John Candy. Writer and director John Hughes gets to tell some travel horror stories he didn't tell as only the writer of the two National Lampoon's Vacations. Broad, of course, but not as much so as you expect of …
Virtual one-man operation (director, writer, producer, co-editor Andy Anderson) of modest means and modest attainments: a practical, how-to approach to a Fort Worth housewife setting up a secret life under a new identity; not much suspense about what she has in mind; clever touches in slightly larger number than crass …
Very primitive science fiction, of the Bug-Eyed Monster persuasion. A team of commandos trying to run a rescue operation in the jungles of Latin America is pestered on the job by a chameleonic creature with psychedelic eyesight, who's at his best as a humanoid blob of colorless, striated jello. There …
The short life and bloody death of British playwright Joe Orton, fitted into a sort of Star Is Born mold, with the Norman Maine role occupied by Orton's one-time lover, longer-time roommate, and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell: himself a would-be actor-novelist-artist (in that chronological order), but relegated instead to maid …
Graduate students (plus one professor and one priest) assemble in the church of the Brotherhood of Sleep to fend off the Anti-Christ, now ready for action. As in Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing, John Carpenter conceives of the situation as a sort of Howard Hawksian group under siege, …
Rob Reiner, who's said to have been wanting to make a movie of the William Goldman novel for many more years than he'd actually been a moviemaker, is not at this point a good enough director to cover up for a not good enough idea: he's still tied too tightly …