A treasure hunt in the West Indies goes swiftly from the dull to the laughable, with very little time in between for the remotely interesting. Faye Dunaway throws body, soul, and contact lenses into the role that makes every actress dream of Oscar: blind lady in distress. With Daniel J. …
Feds and mobsters alike are after one little bounty hunter and a white-collar bail-jumper. The attempts at ingratiation are at times a little queasy-making (the bounty hunter was drummed out of the police force for his honesty, the embezzler took money from the mob and gave it to charity), but …
A specimen of Capra-esque populism in minority clothing, to do with a Little Man who won't step aside for the big-shot developers. The impish white-haired angel, for example, is pure Capra-corn (to borrow a coinage from Manny Farber); only the sombrero and serape are impure. Even at that, the regional …
Alan Parker's fictionalization of an FBI probe into the murders of three Civil Rights activists, ca. 1964, has come under fire for, among other things, ignoring the black involvement in "the movement." That notwithstanding, the real trouble with the movie, so far from it not doing enough with the subject, …
A mustache-on-Mona-Lisa movie about the Parisian smart set of the 1920s, and about the shift of fashion (nothing more permanent than that) that would draw the gaze of the world toward Hollywood and toward pictures that move rather than those that just hang there. In this last twilit tour of …
Odd little chiller about a mind-meld between a quadriplegic and the capuchin monkey trained to do his bidding. Some of his bidding, the part of it that comes from his id, includes anger against his nurse's parakeet, his ex-girlfriend, his doctor, his mother (for slapping him silly when he can't …
Pat O'Connor's adaptation of the J.L. Carr novel (not the Turgenev play) tells the one about the battle-scarred Tommy and the vicar's wife, the very one that David Lean told, rather more eventfully, in Ryan's Daughter. The mystery elements here -- what lies behind the coats of paint on the …
A reworking of the undying dead-ringer-for-royalty theme (The Prince and the Pauper, The Prisoner of Zenda, State Secret, and closest of all, The Magnificent Fraud), in this case a New York actor shoehorned onto the four-inch lifts of a Caribbean dictator. The initial setting of the scene shows some nice …
Tim Burton oversees a lavish and garish horror comedy that captures the spirit of Halloween as deeply as, but no deeplier than, the Woolworth's costume department. Not for lack of expenditure. The best special effects that money can buy do not, however, come with any guarantee of charm -- one …
And drinks battery acid for nourishment, plucks eggs out of boiling water with her naked fingers, etc., etc. It plays (excepting some bits of "PG-13" smut) like a pilot for a TV series: Mork and Mindy with Kim Basinger as Mork and Dan Aykroyd as Mindy. A pilot, however, not …
On the brink of adulthood with three young women in a Connecticut fishing village, each of them characterized with a branding iron and sent down a path as constricting as a cattle chute. Kat, the most interesting of the three, is the smart one, is astronomy, is Mozart, is four …
Cop-film spoof from the Airplane team: a high-speed mix of the stupid and the clever -- into something either cleverly stupid or stupidly clever. The team does get some hits, but the overall batting average is low. Leslie Nielsen's imposter baseball umpire comes closest to the status of a "classic" …
A group of Medievalites, guided by an epileptic child, goes through the center of the earth to escape the Black Death, and comes out on the far side in modern-day New Zealand. It sounds as if it must have been meant to be funny, but it wasn't. It's more as …