It certainly sounds like a John Grisham thriller (definite article, noun), though the original novel was in fact by a George Dawes Green. Yet it even looks a bit like a Grisham, a damsel-in-distress thing (or a Demi-in-distress, Moore exactly), set against the backdrop of a Mafia murder trial, with …
A light snooze through the subjects of race, crime, politics, and jazz in said city -- hometown of director Robert Altman -- in the mid-Thirties. To summarize it in such terms is to make it sound more ambitious than it honestly is. The period re-creation -- the array of automobiles, …
No-holds-barred lowbrow comedy, with unusual levels of nerve and endurance, especially on the fun-poking possibilities of a prosthetic appendage and bald-spot comb-overs. It goes soft at the end, although later than you might expect. And the bowling ambience, in which a one-handed has-been is preparing an Amish bumpkin for a …
Cool-headed, steady-handed piece of filmmaking, from Claude Chabrol. The narrative is efficiently gotten off the mark ("Let me explain the situation ...") in a pre-credits scene in which the ladylike Jacqueline Bisset, well at home in the French language, interviews the rather strange-seeming (and always fascinating) Sandrine Bonnaire for the …
Sluggish elephant comedy (what would you expect?), with a couple of pleasantly giddy stretches: first, when Bill Murray tries to wing it behind the wheel of a big rig; second, when he asks for a change of clothes in a New Mexico pueblo and receives John Wayne's She Wore a …
Sharon Stone on death row, and evidently after graduation from the Farrah Fawcett School of Serious Acting: minimal makeup; minimal hair care; maximal Southern White Trash accent ("Ye-oo probby thank ya know everthang bout my"). The finale, futilely seeking suspense in the commonplace, takes us step by step (dead woman …
Walter Hill's remake and resettlement of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and so Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars as well, in a Texas border town during Prohibition. (The warring factions have now metamorphosed into Irish and Italian bootlegging mobs, and the transient Man-with-No-Name christens himself with the classic alias of "John Smith.") …
Five Iowa grad students, of liberal persuasion, start up a tradition of inviting assorted reactionaries to Sunday dinner in order to poison them. A black comedy that struts its color as if it were fire-engine red. Stagy; stiffly directed (by Stacy Title); coarsely photographed. With Annabeth Gish (what a waste!), …
Homosexual revenge play in which the delicate Adonises behind the bars of a Quebec penitentiary re-enact a long-ago romance for the benefit of the visiting bishop who lived it. The prison walls soon give way, by force of imagination, to a fully costumed period production on location. It's stagy, even …
Ostensible, possible murder mystery. Two souvenir hunters on a long-deserted rifle range in a remote corner of a nonessential military base discover, among the cacti and yucca, a single set of human remains. Initial indications -- the Mason's ring that got the attention of the metal detector, a rusted tin …
An amnesiac schoolteacher and single mom, filling in her memory after eight years of blank, discovers that she used to be the heroine of Point of No Return (or La Femme Nikita), a professional assassin in the employ of U.S. intelligence. Her former bosses, now in a budget crunch, hope …
For Shakespeare's Richard III, to be exact. But this is Reader's Digest Condensed Shakespeare, Cliff Notes Shakespeare, classroom Shakespeare: acted-out highlights of the text, annotated with scholarly commentary (Gielgud, Branagh, Vanessa Redgrave, Derek Jacobi, and assorted academics who require some identification), cast rehearsals, man-on-the-street interviews, and the private discussions and …
Amanda and Laurel. Runaway sisters from separate foster homes. The teenage one has gotten herself pregnant, and compounds the problem with the dim idea of kidnapping the knowledgeable and opinionated clerk from Connie's Baby Connection. The clerk turns out to have problems of her own. "Are you saying she's some …
Not just a movie title, but an honorific conferred by Playgirl magazine on its readership's annual favorite centerfold. For the year 1992, that was Dirk Shafer, thus officially inducted into the army of male sex symbols who in their private lives prefer males themselves. A pregnant topic for a movie, …
Tim Burton's sniggering hommage to grade-B science fiction. Hordes of computer-animated Little Green Men with big heads and exposed brains, reminiscent of the aliens in This Island Earth, annihilate the majority of the big-name cast (including Jack Nicholson in two roles, Glenn Close, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Danny DeVito, …