A sort of retro-tech thriller, a nice change from high-tech thrillers, in which two brothers, driving cross-country in a vintage '71 Chrysler Newport equipped with a CB radio, play a practical joke on a trucker self-dubbed "Rusty Nail," sending him for a romantic rendezvous to the motel room of a …
The big splash of writer-director Joel Hopkins is actually more of a small plop: a would-be sprightly road movie cum buddy movie about a reluctant Nigerian fiancé and a rejected French suitor who travel together to the former's appointed wedding in Niagara Falls, the Capital of Love as well as …
Elementary and elemental spectacle of ravening dinosaurs and edible humans. Beyond that, it pretty much eludes criticism or comment. A small objection might be raised at the way dinosaurs, for live-action purposes (which is to say live-action humans, but computer-generated dinosaurs), have become the monopoly of the Jurassic Park franchise. …
Who woulda thunk that The Covenant would get its own doppelganger a la Deep Impact and Armageddon? But here we are: an undercover CIA operative gets stuck in hostile territory in Afghanistan after his mission is exposed. Accompanied by his translator, he must fight enemy combatants as he tries to …
Timely exposé of the plight of women under the Taliban. The narrative peg -- an exiled Afghan journalist sneaking back into the country to reach her sister before the latter's pre-announced suicide in concert with the final eclipse of the 20th Century -- may be overly contrived and corny, and …
Time-travel romance (or in the words of the whiz-kid Cupid who makes it happen, "a 4-D pretzel of kismetic inevitability") uniting a Type-A Manhattan career woman and a 19th-century British duke, who tumbles through a time-portal into the present day. The matching of Meg Ryan -- tossing around and peering …
Graceless comedy about the gathering of the Slocumb family to put Daddy Bud in the ground. The funeral parlor is named Depew's, and the lisping pastor breaks wind in the middle of his oration -- just for instance. With LL Cool J, Vivica A. Fox, Jada Pinkett Smith, Anthony Anderson, …
Hong Kong goes to Paris. The buildup to the first big explosion of action is beautifully sustained, and Jet Li has an impeccable businesslike demeanor. But then all hell breaks loose, and that's where the movie goes straight to. With Bridget Fonda and Tcheky Karyo; directed by Chris Nahon.
The Dark Ages lightened up: a rock-and-roll songtrack (Queen, Bowie, BTO, others), a spontaneous eruption of disco dancing at court, a Nike insignia on a suit of armor, a Mademoiselle cover girl for a fair maiden, and a centuries-ahead-of-his-time democratic hero, a lowborn squire who skyrockets to superstardom in the …
Eric Rohmer, practically the poster boy for Verbal Cinema, tries his hand at a special-effects movie. That's not to say that it's any less talky, stilted, static, and stagy than Rohmer's norm: a fact-based tale of the French Revolution, taken from the memoirs of one Grace Elliott, an English aristocrat …
A regretful gay romance between a shady middle-aged Beijing businessman and his college-age paid consort. At the end, there may well be a feeling of "So what?" And yet, in retort to that, there's something refreshing, even liberating, about the mere existence of a gay film without politics -- without …
The daughter of Sir Richard Croft inherits a sacred mission from her late father, who seems to have known when she was eight years old that she would grow up to be a militant extremist of Girl Power, and known too that she would discover the hidden clock and his …
Robert Redford returns to Brubaker mode as a prison reformer, only this time it's a military prison and he himself is a prisoner, a much-decorated general, former Vietnam POW, author of the biblical Burden of Command, and a man of such loyalty and integrity that he opted not to fight …
Hectic sex comedy, almost Restoration-like in its worldly-wise cynicism and indulgence, revolving around five Italian best buddies on the brink of thirty. One of them, the pivotal one, is an unmarried father-to-be with a wandering eye for an eighteen-year-old blonde, a sort of Florentine "Marcia Brady." One is a recent …