Predigested heroic myth to do with a lion cub called Simba, rightful heir to the paradisiacal pridelands, dispossessed by a Machiavellian uncle, and — no need to go on. The apotheosis of Joseph Campbell into a household name has not been a boon to the fictional imagination. The prince in …
Predigested heroic myth to do with a lion cub called Simba, rightful heir to the paradisiacal pridelands, dispossessed by a Machiavellian uncle, and — no need to go on. The apotheosis of Joseph Campbell into a household name has not been a boon to the fictional imagination. The prince in …
Family pablum about an eleven-year-old baseball fan (Luke Edwards) who inherits the Minnesota Twins from his granddad, installs himself as their manager ("It's the American League. They got the DH. How hard can it be?"), and learns that he wants still to be a kid. High on decency, low on …
Big bore. Reincarnation is notoriously unfilmable as a "straight" subject, though it can sometimes be smuggled through under cover of fantasy. Dead Again was no more than laughable, but Audrey Rose was legitimate fun, and Exorcist II was great, glorious, delirious fun and a lot else besides. Fun, however, is …
Brother Nerd coaches his Scrubs (including his tomboy daughter nicknamed -- brace yourself -- Icebox) against Brother All-Star and his Bullies in a Pee-Wee Football playoff. The winner is never in doubt: first one to fall behind by twenty-one points. With Rick Moranis, Ed O'Neill, and Shawna Waldron; directed by …
All the old gang -- beanie, derby, cowlick, bowtie, overalls, and all -- living in a time warp in contemporary Los Angeles. Director Penelope Spheeris regularly speeds up the physical action, but there's nothing she can do about the draggy voices, or their piercing pitch. (The spectator, of course, can …
Feministically enlightened treatment of the Louisa May Alcott chestnut -- reason enough to remake it, though it's still a little insipid and nicey-nice. (Ultra-conservatives, however, can take away a rationale against charity for the poor: you might catch something deadly at their door. ) Trini Alvarado's Meg and Kirstin Dunst's …
Warren Beatty's remake -- nominally directed by Glenn Gordon Caron, but produced and co-written by Beatty -- of Leo McCarey's 1939 shipboard romance (remade by McCarey himself in 1957, as An Affair to Remember). In spite of the secondhandedness, the film must be acknowledged as a "personal" one for its …
Generation X, Canadian chapter: a large cast of characters of various sexual orientations and disorientations. One of them is a serial sex killer. Which one? The mystery-suspense element is a total bust, but the hip-cool element ("Honey, I'm homo!") is a far cry from a gold mine. The first English-language …
Shame's the name. Shamus is the game. And it doesn't get much lower down. Crude, clunky, stupid-alecky. (Sassy secretary: "What happened to you?" Roughed-up gumshoe: "I went partying with Rodney King and Reginald Denny.") Directed by and starring Keenen Ivory Wayans; with Jada Pinkett, Salli Richardson, and Charles Dutton.
Curiously disjointed and jumpy for something that originated as a theater piece (by Alan Bennett), with little in the way of sustained dialogues and developed scenes. George III of England, but no longer of the American Colonies, is given a distinctive way of talking ("Yes! Yes!" "What? What?" "Hey! Hey!"), …
The baseball fan will find as much to grouse about as the movie fan: bottom of the ninth, two out, runners on first and second, home team ahead by one run, and the pitcher intentionally walks the batter in order to set up a confrontation with the stubbly-chinned bad guy. …
And a movie to match. A drab little comedy, sans laughs, about a repressed homosexual bus conductor, in early-Sixties Dublin, who has aspirations to high art: namely as director of an amateur theatrical production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Albert Finney makes the man human enough, overcoming a good deal of …
Director Kenneth Branagh -- not Mary Shelley -- has obviously done some dutiful research on the Romantic Era from which the original novel sprang. (Correct full title: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.) And the products of these researches have armed him with an excuse for any old expressive excess, and …
Comic-book fantasy about a nebbishy bank clerk who fishes a 4th- or 5th-century Scandinavian mask out of the bay, and is transformed by it into the pea-headed embodiment -- pea-like in color, that is, not size, and canned not frozen -- of his wildest dreams. There's no stinting on the …