Small-scale (human-scale) apocalyptic thriller, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt. A nice chain of coincidence brings our common-man hero to the receiving end of a wrong phone number, alerting him to the imminence of nuclear holocaust. (You have an hour and ten minutes until the strike. What do you …
Besides being the title of the movie, this is the title of the Yazoo City, Mississippi, beauty queen. The chief pretender to that throne is played by Holly Hunter, who played her also in the original play. That, of course, was before Hunter's movie career took off so vertically, and …
Joe Eszterhas has written here as silly a courtroom drama as he did in Jagged Edge, though with even less of deception and complication, and he counts on the soberness of the theme -- a naturalized American citizen charged with collaborationist war crimes -- to compel our respect. That, and …
Specimen of that dreaded genre, and TV staple, the disease movie, in this case the true story of Christy Brown, the Dublin painter and author afflicted with cerebral palsy. As compared with its TV cousins, it's blessedly free of "edification" (while offering plenty of laconic triumph and uplift), but at …
Jim Jarmusch's omnibus of three short stories, elegantly structured so that the stories, though occurring simultaneously and in the same general place (a predominantly black section of Memphis, and ultimately a specific seedy hotel therein), are told consecutively, with no switching back and forth. A gunshot heard offscreen near the …
What if they remade A Christmas Story, except with more pratfalls? Lots more pratfalls. And meaner humor. With Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Randy Quaid; directed by Jeremiah Chechik.
Three of them, directed at low intensity by Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. No one would accuse Scorsese, for his part, of holding anything back in the way of technical virtuosity: you get slow motion and fast cuts; you get low angles and high ones; you get a …
Family feud between the Kentucky hill folk and the Chicago mob. Warns the pony-tailed cop who spans both worlds: "You ain't seen bad, but it's comin'." And for sure the climactic battle, in which the hillbillies unleash their total arsenal of knives, arrows, hatchets, dogs, and snakes, is even worse …
The title role is the Ambrose Bierce of legend, who threw over the literary life and vanished without trace in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. It's a difficult role to fill, because it, like Bierce himself, is so much hot air. But Gregory Peck, calling on all his stature, …
Crudely effective political thriller. (Plot Formula 1-B: the military can't sit by and watch a couple of Gorbachev and Bush look-alikes sign a disarmament pact; they've got to assassinate somebody.) The storyline is decently complicated, but the pace (to say nothing of the camerawork) is too pell-mell to take much …
This has been described as a Nightmare on Elm Street for adults, but at the risk of flattering the sporadic adolescent and insulting the common adult, it might be better to say a Nightmare on Elm Street for anyone for whom A Nightmare on Elm Street is not. Unlike that …
Four generations and four households result in too diffuse a scope (and too disparate an acting ensemble: from the cartoonishness of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis to the fussy pointillism of Dianne Wiest). The filmmakers clearly wanted to cover all possibilities, and some of the possibilities have a deep bedrock …
A black comedy constructed out of the materials of an only child's overactive imagination. It's just a little disappointing, a little poetically licentious, when it turns out that that overactive imagination belongs really to the scriptwriter, Christopher Hawthorne, rather than to the patriphobic little hero. Nonetheless, the movie is a …
The big-screen bow of the stand-up comedy team and "bad boys of magic," who play themselves, more or less, in a tale of escalating practical jokes. They're an uncharismatic pair. Teller's muteness is little more than irritating (and much more limiting than if the comedy team had, let's say, as …
Campfire spooky story about the Indian burial ground that resuscitates corpses. As simple yet messy as one improvised, though it is based on a typed, presumably proofread, and published novel. (Typical of Stephen King's regard for his audience that he would misspell the title three ways to be sure they …