Some early and recurrent Belushisms (from brother James), such as the Instant Breakfast of chocolate powder mixed with Coca-Cola when the milk proves to be sour, retard our realization that we are in the midst of a would-be Blackboard Jungle. The dawn breaks for certain, albeit through persistent haze, when …
Sort of a Kipling animal story transferred to a modern-day Air Force base in Florida: an overeducated and overqualified chimpanzee (graduate of a sign-language course at the University of Wisconsin) stirs up trouble among his experimental comrades in a Strategic Weapons Research Program. Effective, heart-in-throat bit of antivivisection rhetoric, with …
Woody Allen back in his Woody Fellini mode, after the Woody Bergman mode of Hannah and Her Sisters (after the Woody Fellini mode of The Purple Rose of Cairo, and so on), with an Italian production designer and an Italian cinematographer -- Santo Loquasto and Carlo Di Palma -- to …
The Coen brothers, in their second movie, have taken great personal strides. No longer trying to walk the thin line between pastiche and parody that so held them back in Blood Simple, veering off instead into the woolliest wilds of their combined imaginations, they — director and co-writer Joel and …
A sort of Chinese Edna Ferber epic, to do with a doughty young maiden (or Chinese Jane Wyman) taking over her fiancé's winery after his murder, surviving an attack by bandits but not by the Japanese army, and leaving behind a nine-year-old son to tell the tale. Highly commercial, highly …
A comedy of appalling and almost consistently amusing squalor, set in sooty Northern England, about a romantic triangle (quadrangle, if you remember the wife) composed of two teenage babysitters and the baby's father. The only clue that these people (Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes, and George Costigan, in the order named) …
Based on a true incident: a teenage boy strangles his girlfriend ("She was talking shit") and shows off the body to his friends, who fail to do the morally and legally "right thing." What's the matter with today's youth, anyway? The "incident" itself is all right -- well-staged, matter-of-fact, creepily …
One-man-army revenge fantasy, but with more of a "reason" for the hero's invincibility than is normally mustered for someone like Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris: he's a cyborg, implanted with the brain cells (and painfully vivid memories) of a murdered Detroit policeman. Moving with the smartness of a drum major, …
One-man-army revenge fantasy, but with more of a "reason" for the hero's invincibility than is normally mustered for someone like Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris: he's a cyborg, implanted with the brain cells (and painfully vivid memories) of a murdered Detroit policeman. Moving with the smartness of a drum major, …
Inebriating romantic moonshine about a courtesan of the 1930s who turns up as a ghost in present-day Hong Kong looking for the lover with whom she shared a suicide pact. The presence of this dreamy-eyed, breathy-voiced vamp in the modern world brings an unhappy, but not unamusing, clash of styles; …
Steve Martin as a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac (without the benefit, for some reason, of plastic surgery): a small-town fire chief, an anywhere-on-earth Renaissance man, and owner of the longest nose outside of Pinocchio in his white-lie phase. Most of the renovations of the Rostand play are perfectly acceptable. The …
Two-faced sci-fi satire about a TV game show of 2019 A.D. that caters to the public's taste for violence with actual, to-the-death manhunts. The difference between that game show and this movie is in degree, not in kind. Plus the fact that the game show is only imaginary while the …
Détente for children. Three grade-school-age, comic-book-fed Junior American Jingoists find a shipwrecked Soviet Adonis (an E.T. with blond locks) and get to know him, man to boys. The prepubescent voices, never mind what they are saying, are a torture all their own. Whip Hubley, Leaf Phoenix, Peter Billingsley, Stefan DeSalle; …
The Oscar Wilde play as it might have been privately performed before the author himself by amateur actors at a fin-de-siècle brothel. The overripe production, and most especially the overarch title portrait by Imogen Millais-Scott, makes little sense within the given framework. But were you to take another step outward …