Oliver Stone's blitz of professional football. Long (almost three hours long, almost JFK and Nixon long), loud, hyperbolic, frenetic, chaotic, trite, cynical, sentimental, sanctimonious. And ill-informed. Stone seems to believe that a touchdown counts seven points; that playoff stats are added on to regular-season totals; that both sides in a …
Moral tale about the brash young turks (especially the pasty, mumbly Giovanni Ribisi) of a crooked stock brokerage. An uncinematic subject ("Do you know what 'bridge financing' is?") injected with testosterone and hip-hop. They're no help, and nor is the sickly bluish-greenish image. Writer-director Ben Younger is up front about …
The All-American boy grows up playing soldier in Massapequa, Long Island, is further instilled with the fighting spirit on the high-school wrestling team, gets recruited by the Marines ("There is nothing finer, nothing prouder, nothing standing as straight ..."), goes to Vietnam, gets disillusioned, gets shot, gets paralyzed from the …
Paranoia thriller without a milliwatt of power to compel belief. Mel Gibson, reunited with his Lethal Weapon director, Richard Donner, is an addlepated Manhattan cabbie, loonier than Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, who puts out a newsletter of exposés on the order of "The Oliver Stone-George Bush Connection." (Number of subscribers: …
And Jim Morrison. Oliver Stone's conventional, chronological biography bashes along at a breakneck pace, barely touching ground, barreling right into the middle of events, forgoing the surrounding context and grabbing at the harried TV director's daily lifesaver: the constant closeup. There may be some justification for this device in the …
Adequate biographical data (narrated by Ron Howard), generous film clips (of uneven print quality), and perhaps overgenerous eulogies (from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, John Milius, and Robert Altman), in celebration of the centennial of Capra's birth. Written and directed by Kenneth Bowser.
John Boorman's underworld drama in old-style black-and-white (Seamus Deasy, cinematographer), mustering a wide range of grays on a wide screen, with subtle gradations and occasional spots of harsh glare on the polished surface. The title figure is the real-life Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill (we learn to say it CAH-hill, …
Oliver Stone in his appointed role -- self-appointed, make that -- of dispenser of strong medicine. His patented technique: put the patient in a headlock and pinch his nose with one hand, then force a funnel down his throat and pour in castor oil with the other. That's a pretty …
Paolo Sorrentino, making like an Italian Oliver Stone, rifles through “the Spectacular Life of Giulio Andreotti” (in the words of the subtitle), seven-term Prime Minister rumored to have Mafia ties and blood on his hands, less a character than a caricature in the interpretation of Toni Servillo, jug ears, humpback, …
The size of this is beyond me, comments New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the course of his probe into the Kennedy assassination. And to the extent that writer-director Oliver Stone identifies himself with his lone-voice hero, truer words were never spoken. Essentially the movie is simply a remake …
Oliver Stone's ballad of the alliterative Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis), who crisscross the American Southwest on a Charles Starkweather-ish murder spree, but multiplied many times for purposes of "satire." Also part of the picture, also part of the "satire," is a tabloid TV show called American Maniacs, …
Oliver Stone's scrapbook, lapsing at times into collage, on our thirty-seventh President -- assembled with characteristic hands-of-Stone clumsiness, and overloaded to the groaning point. (One by one the cherished anecdotes materialize: Nixon talking in the dead of night to the Presidential portraits; Nixon "rapping" with peaceniks bivouacked at the Lincoln …