Defanged vampire comedy, suitable for the entire family, or at least for the juvenile fraction of it, about a San Diego tyke who befriends a boy bloodsucker on a sojourn in Scotland. (Good fun with the local accent.) The best joke may be that the director is the same Uli …
Inauspicious directing debut of cameraman Janusz Kaminski (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan), a rudimentary Devil movie freighted with arty photography (desaturated colors, clouds of dust particles) and ponderous pacing. With Winona Ryder, Ben Chaplin, John Hurt, Elias Koteas, Philip Baker Hall, Alfre Woodard.
The slant is heavily toward love, but the lovers -- next-door neighbors since elementary school -- have no personalities other than as basketball players. If the movie itself were a ballplayer, the scouting report would read, "Slow afoot, with limited mobility and telegraphed moves." Christine Dunford has the right attitude …
The writing and directing debut of lower-crust actress Valerie Breiman, a "relationship" comedy, and damn near the epitome of a "chick flick," all the way to the folky songs on the soundtrack ("Don't worry, it's all right./ We're all in the dark, lookin' for the light"). The subject is of …
Subheaded "A Romantic Musical Comedy." Under the guidance of Kenneth Branagh (whose air of authority deflates completely whenever Alicia Silverstone is permitted to open her mouth), this Shakespeare production has been updated to 1939, then punctuated with newly written newsreel plot summaries as well as with song-and-dance numbers -- not …
Nora Ephron, in a sort of comic counterpart to A Simple Plan, tells what happens to the people, and those around them, who successfully scam the Pennsylvania State Lottery for six-point-four million, but who then must find somebody else to cash in the ticket: a "beard." It isn't pretty, and …
Messy docudrama on a messy subject, the unrest in the newly independent Congo and the martyrdom of its first prime minister after two months in office. Raoul Peck, the Haitian director, had treated the subject in an all-out documentary nine years earlier. (Valerio Zurlini, freed by false names and unencumbered …
An eccentric tycoon enlists a lowly waiter to be his personal taster, ostensibly to protect him from fish and cheese. But what's his real game? Vaguely intriguing psychological thriller, never very believable but never truly tiresome. With Jean-Pierre Lorit, Bernard Giraudeau, Florence Thomassin, Charles Berling, Jean-Pierre Léaud; directed by Bernard …
A bad-to-worse weekend for a male nurse named Focker (you'll need several sets of fingers and toes to count up the utterances of that name), who accompanies his prospective fiancée to his prospective sister-in-law's wedding. The women, including the prospective mother-in-law, virtually fade into the woodwork, as all attention centers …
As always with the Farrelly brothers (Bobby, Peter), the dispiriting thing is not that their movie is never amusing, but that it's amusing once in a while. The rest of the time is a damn shame. The high concept (as they call these things in the trade), of a Rhode …
The Aussies have a go at the alternative-realities game: the Run, Lola, Run game, the Sliding Doors and Twice upon a Yesterday game, the Smoking/No Smoking game. And it was only a matter of time, with so many people having a go at it, that the game would dissolve into …
Old-fashioned, dewy-eyed salute to the Navy's first "colored" deep-sea diver -- a Jackie Robinson story. To put it securely in that framework, we even hear a snippet of play-by-play from a Robinson game over the hero's homemade radio, a gift from his sharecropper father. Nice moment when the smashed radio …
Warmly lit but thin and poky Brazilian comedy (based on fact) of a rustic ménage-à-quatre composed of an earth mother, her indolent new husband, and her two recruited lovers. (Not counting her children by each.) Commanding performance from Regina Casé, a sort of browner, plumper Frances McDormand. Sonia Braga she's …