The athleticism in this Warner Brothers swashbuckler is shown to be of a dubious character when Eugene Pallette, built like an egg, outmaneuvers Errol Flynn in a five-minute stick fight on a foot-wide plank. From that moment, it is plain that the memorized moments in the Robin Hood legend are …
Buñuel's rascally subversions and perversions seem, in a way, more precious in the period prior to when they were expected of him (him, the Sovereign Surrealist), when instead they had to be smuggled out furtively, nervily, when they came from under the counter only. And there is hardly a better …
We already knew that Jay Ward's Rocky and His Friends was the hip kids' show of the Sixties. Now we know that screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan and director Des McAnuff knew it, too. But knowing it and being it are two different things. The mumbo-jumbo that permits the three inept villains …
Normal teen confusion, compounded by a mop-haired stepdad who's undergoing a sex change ("He still wants to be with my mom, so I guess that makes him a dyke"). A coming-of-age tale, circa 1983, with that special American-independent spin -- or wobble. Unreal, unfunny, uninvolving. With Adrian Grenier, Clark Gregg, …
The daydream superheroes of a bullied grade-schooler come to life, pull him out of the classroom, fly him to Planet Drool (Where Kids Rule), ride the Train of Thought to the Land of Milk and Cookies, take a Banana-Split Boat down the Steam of Consciousness, and so on. Didactic kiddie …
Notwithstanding some larger deficiencies, the quality of individual gags is reasonably high -- high-spirited, high-strung. There are several larger deficiencies to withstand, however. Gene Wilder, who seems understandably hard-pressed by the multiple chores of acting, writing, and directing, tends to chase after the closest laugh; and the plot and characters, …
Another animated mouse from the Disney studio, in fact a whole society of them underneath (and a perfect mirror image of) the London of 1897. They have their own mouse queen beneath Buckingham Palace, who coincidentally happens to be celebrating her own Diamond Jubilee. And they have a portly medical …
One of the better of Otto Preminger's sprawling adaptations of big, fat, multi-character, best-selling novels, this one Allen Drury's melodramatic civics lesson on cut-throat politics in D.C. The large cast -- Fonda, Laughton, Pidgeon, Don Murray, George Grizzard, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney (a comeback role for the star …
Right on screen at the outset, the viewer, or reviewer, is enjoined not to reveal the identity of "the client." (The Miramax company, hoping to recapture past fortune, even makes specific reference to its The Crying Game.) But this willfully misrepresents, or misunderstands, the nature of the narrative. The client's …
The live-action adaptation of an MTV cartoon remains so cartoonish — what with its computer-generated futuristic utopia, computer-animated internal organs, computer-manipulated stunts and body doubles, computer this and computer that — it's a wonder it bothered with flesh-and-blood actors at all. Charlize Theron, who may have been worried after Monster …
Dull title, and for good reason. That's not the title. The title in the original French, the title spelled out on screen, is Une Liaison Pornographique, no translation necessary. (Maybe an explanation of "irony" is necessary.) The film itself, concerning a pair of perfect strangers who meet through the Classifieds …
Skulduggery in and around the court of Louis XVI, based on fact, with interpretive leeway. So stuffy and stilted a costume piece ("How skillfully you play the rogue. Yet even you cannot mask such impenetrable loneliness") that it approaches parody. When Christopher Walken turns up in the part of Cagliostro, …
A legacy-of-abuse tragedy with heavy psychologizing and moralizing -- altogether as chilly as its upstate New Hampshire locale during deer-hunting season. It showcases ferociously fine work from Nick Nolte as the figurehead policeman of a sleepy small town, not unlike the Stallone character in Copland, who convinces himself that a …
Dryly academic thriller on the themes of blindness and perception, a tall order for a director without much of an eye: screenwriter Mark Peploe, past collaborator of Antonioni and Bertolucci. An unscrupulous switch from Oz to Kansas (in effect) pulls the rug out from under you halfway through, and you …
An abnormally hairy, scratching, apish Bogart and a normally haughty Hepburn appear to thrive and purr and scarcely conceal their delight amid the purported annoyances of the Congo wilderness, of the First World War, and of each other's company. James Agee's script seems somewhat trampled-on, as though it were regarded …