Grandfather and grandson swap personalities, and reverse the digits in their ages, after plowing the Rolls into a storefront. The old man's body remains laid up at the hospital, while his soul does handsprings inside a college freshman: this arrangement allows George Burns to fire off some interior-monologue wisecracks without …
Exciting year, excruciating movie. Ernest (On Golden Scum) Thompson, directing for the first time in addition to writing, makes a characteristically shallow belly-flop onto deep thematic waters: Vietnam, the generation gap, long hair, LSD — that whole package. The finale — a funeral party turned protest march — is guaranteed …
A night and a day with a budding Lolita. Delphine Zentout, notwithstanding her majestic chest, is a credible fourteen-year-old -- no Norma Shearer playing Juliet. But what then? Ragged and draggy realism, laden with French worldliness: "Dip your wick three times in the same girl and forget it." Directed by …
Introducing (drum-roll, please) new movie tough guy Steven Seagal (cymbal-crash!): "You guys think you're above the law. Well, you ain't above mine." If the tango dancer's hairstyle and gigolo's gentle purr don't quite convince you, the "ain't" should allay all doubts. His most unique contribution to the action-hero pantheon: a …
Single-handedly, William Hurt damn near ruins the movie. Always a strange, always a mannered, always a tormented actor, he would appear here to be making a concerted effort to find out how close he can get to being the World's Worst Actor without sacrificing the good opinion of his fans …
Elementary Rape Education, based very loosely on erroneous news accounts of an actual incident that reportedly took place in front of cheering onlookers in a public bar. (Is the pinball machine on which the rape here occurs -- about as ugly a scene, in about as many different ways, as …
He's a steel-fisted, but gunless, Detroit police sergeant (demoted from lieutenant), with a Harvard law degree and a '66 Chevy Impala. Scriptwriter Robert Reneau -- who has a few cute ideas, such as a hairdresser named Dee who is prone to alliterate with the fourth letter of the alphabet -- …
Dimly socially conscious sci-fi about interplanetary (more than just interracial) cop partners, on the trail of one of the alien's fellows. (We are given a derogatory term for them -- "slags" -- such as must accompany all minorities; and we are invited -- no, begged -- to laugh at their …
Hawaii, 1959. Mainlanders from the east, Japanese from the west, mixing democratically with the natives and teaching each other the arts of kendo, surfing, and making out, with plenty of enlightenment to share with any viewer under the age of eight. Chris Makepeace, Yuji Okumoto, Don Michael Paul, Tia Carrere; …
Roger Vadim's update of his own 1956 film, but not of the haystack hairdo on the heroine -- now a budding rock-and-roll singer in New Mexico (and in fact, with that hairdo, she does look a little like David Lee Roth). In the thirty-year interim, Vadim has forgotten a lot …
Bigas Luna, the bad boy of post-Franco Spanish cinema (witness the pubic haircut of the drugged heroine in Bilbao), has been on his better behavior for the world at large (cf. the somber religious parable, Reborn). In this handsome production, he has taken over an idea from Lamberto Bava's Demons …
Woody Allen's followup to September: more of the same, but a bit better. It's true that Allen still isn't on screen in it. And his dialogue continues to be overly declarative and explanatory, so that characters' utterances sound more like psychological profiles and biographical backgrounds from the author's Preliminary Notes: …
An Agatha Christie who-done-it, but almost equally a when's-it-going-to-be-done-and-who's-it-going-to-be-done-to. And the social observation during the waiting period isn't keen enough to ward off dreadful boredom. Nor is the cast enough, though it's certainly sizeable, and encompasses such stalwarts as Peter Ustinov (as Poirot once again), Piper Laurie, Carrie Fisher, Lauren …
Hexes, hexagrams, and such, in rural Pennsylvania (or the moss-green Norwegian locales that pass for it) in the 1920s. "Inspired by a true story," but not very truly inspired: a slow starter, a slow finisher, and a slow in-betweener. With Donald Sutherland, Chad Lowe, and Mia Sara; directed by R.L. …