Louis Malle being funny. Not a happy sight. Not altogether as miserable a sight as, for example, his Viva Maria or his Crackers, but still. It's set in the provincial splendor of Malle's own upbringing. The matriarch of a run-down wine estate has died unexpectedly, and the far-flung family gathers …
Dramatic re-enactment of William Wyler's classic wartime documentary on a bomber crew that must make one more run to finish out their tour of duty. Somehow it's less dramatic (and even in drabber color) than the real thing, despite pulling out all the stops: the pilot speaks intimately to his …
Eternally larkish trash collectors (playing Frisbee with a plastic trash-can lid, etc.) pick up a murdered City Councilman in a Hazardous Waste container. Would-be black comedy diluted to dishwater gray, partly by liberal piety (the stiff in the Dick Nixon mask), mostly by comic indelicacy. With Emilio Estevez and Charlie …
A loss-and-recovery weepie about the All-American Family (two boys, of high-school and grade-school age) devastated by the death of the breadwinner and forced to start anew in Anne Tyler's stomping ground, Baltimore. There, the conspiratorial quirkiness of the people and events pretty much invalidates the movie as a universalized soap …
Troubles aplenty: trouble on screen between a free-and-easy mother and a would-be saintly daughter; trouble off screen between Cher and two dismissed directors. It would be hard to think of two more incompetent directors than the third, Richard Benjamin, who seems determined to demote the movie below a sitcom. One …
Pleasantly tipsy social comedy about Manhattan preppies and debs, members of what one of them dubs the "UHB" (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie), who sleep all day, dress up in tuxedos and evening gowns, attend dinners and all-night soirees, and prattle on about matters over their heads. One of them, a self-proclaimed …
Daredevil ex-convict on the loose in Miami. After he steals a homicide cop's badge and gun (and false teeth), he becomes a sort of Superman in reverse, chasing off criminals in the act and then taking over their capers for himself. Directed by former Corman apostle George Armitage — an …
A salute to Dashiell Hammett, in particular Red Harvest, although the absence here of a hero on the right side of the law greatly embellishes (or truly establishes) the moral chaos that some people so obligingly see in Hammett. Overrated as a novelist, the creator of Sam Spade and the …
For all Spike Lee's unflagging efforts to assert himself as a director -- not a "black director," a just plain director, and not really a just plain director either, but a very fancy director -- his chief claim on our attention remains the ease and comfort with which he moves …
Fastidiously manicured French thriller, underplotted (it's from a Simenon novel) and overdirected, so that heavy significance gets piled onto very little. It revolves around a hermetic misanthrope with the sadsack face of a silent-era clown, who spends his evenings spying on his nubile neighbor (with his phonograph needle stuck in …
A long-time pet project of Bob Rafelson: the story of the search for the source of the Nile undertaken by littérateur, explorer, diplomat, swordsman, and all-around Renaissance man, Sir Richard Burton. (The Richard Burton, just as to a few of us the Elizabeth Taylor will always be the author of …
Another attempt by director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to whittle down the list of "classic novels" you feel you ought to get around to some day -- in this case, two novels in one swipe. The movie is laden with bookish talk ("Listen to the locusts! I …
Common little fantasy about a common little man who, on his thirty-fifth birthday, gets to change the moment twenty years earlier when he struck out in the high-school baseball championship. The premise is really only half a premise. While the man's whole life is altered, the man himself isn't, so …
Funny idea: the disorientation of a Mafia informant transplanted to white-bread suburbia through the Federal Witness Protection Program. But the idea gets levelled under relentlessly flat treatment. (Relentlessly but for futile efforts by Rick Moranis, Joan Cusack, William Irwin.) Steve Martin finishes the squash job with an Italian accent twelve …