A comedy of male menopause. The hero, a Hollywood songwriter with personalized license plates that read "ASCAP," is explicitly a product of an earlier, more romantic era, and is quite nakedly a stand-in for writer-director Blake Edwards. Edwards's conscientious efforts to adopt liberal, open-minded, up-to-date attitudes lead him onto some …
Prehistoric Low Camp. The archetypal Hero’s Journey, at its earliest starting point: the outcast of a mountain clan, who appear to wear bird droppings on their faces, wending his way past woolly mammoths, giant man-eating gobblers, a saber-toothed tiger, across the Sea of Sand to the Head of the Snake …
Awkward and long-winded translation of the 1961 Disney animated feature (and anti-furrier fable) into live-action. The dogs are adorable, even eloquent, but hardly as obedient as their cartoon forebears; and Glenn Close's dognapping offenses seem mild next to her overacting. With Jeff Daniels and Joely Richardson; directed by Stephen Herek.
The drawing is a little meager compared to the finest work of the Disney animators; also is afflicted with a bad case of the cutes. But the storyline picks up conspicuously when it moves beyond a couple of frightfully bourgeois dalmatians and introduces several different breeds of dog, as well …
Comedy of sexual confusion, revolving around an Icelandic couch potato who has a New Year's Eve fling with his mother's lesbian lover ("I never cheated on my mother before"). That partner, a Spanish flamenco dancer, turns up pregnant at the same time as the potato's unwanted girlfriend. Tart, earthy, thick-skinned, …
Plus assorted other breeds, plus one loquacious parrot, plus a rehabilitated (not for long) Cruella De Vil ("Please, call me Ella"). A higgledy-piggledy incoherent mess, busy enough and loud enough to distract the little ones, and dismay the bigger. Glenn Close, Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Evans, Gerard Depardieu; directed by Kevin …
A lot of time is spent, and a lot of blood spilt, to set up a situation so simple-minded that we will approve of Charles Bronson throwing out the legal code: "I remember when legal meant lawful," he philosophizes. "Now it means some kind of loophole." Unlike the high-strung sex …
Doomsday documentary on the imminent destruction of Planet Earth if earthlings don't change their ways. As laid out by a big panel of deep thinkers, the what's-gone-wrong part of the film (roughly two-thirds of it) is pretty depressing; the what-can-be-done part (the remaining third) is not commensurately encouraging. Narrated in …
Russian revision of Twelve Angry Men, slightly “opened up” to no benefit (the makeshift jury room is a gymnasium), still stagy, wordy, overacted, mired in lengthy monologues, spun out in excess of two and a half hours. With Sergey Makovetsky, Sergey Garmash, Sergey Gazarov, Valentin Gaft, Alexey Petrenko, Yuri Stoyanov, …
Time-travel brain-twister credited as "inspired [but not very] by the film La Jetée -- the 1962 experimental short composed exclusively of still shots, save one. There are some provocative or at least irksome notions in the script by David and Janet Peoples (Mr. and Mrs.), chief among them the implicit …
With a sprinkle of Wishing Dust, the disaffected young heroine, on her first day of teenhood, is spirited into her future life as a "thirty and flirty and thriving" editor of her favorite fashion magazine, Poise. Yet she's still thirteen in her head, with none of the knowledge, the experience, …
An Arabian Nights tale detoured into a Norse saga. (A little off the beaten path, too, for the author of the original novel, Michael Crichton.) Lots of gore, but lots more hair. John McTiernan's careening Steadicam slips and slides over every possible point of interest. The release was delayed so …
Not just was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery faster into the marketplace (for the quincentenary of the voyage of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria); it was also clearer in story, in character, in actors' diction, in photography. Bad as it was, sometimes amusingly so, this is worse -- …
Socially conscious monstrosity on the stitched-together topics of violence in America, tabloid television, and the cult of celebrity. A couple of new-generation American Dreamers ("You think I came to America to work?"), a Russian and a Czech whose feverish sweat and shifting glances unaccountably fail to set off any alarms …