San Diego Reader

Atlantic City 4.0 stars

Out of this elegiac comedy on Old Age and the Changing Times, Burt Lancaster's fans ought to get the same sort of sentimental tingles that John Wayne's got from True Grit. His role here is as a small-time numbers runner ...

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Jack and Jill 0.0 stars

A film about the perils of success. Watch Al Pacino do his damnedest to shed his legacy (and goof on his beloved Shakespeare while he’s at it). Watch Adam Sandler take the lash to himself for getting rich via crass ...

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The Jungle Book 3.0 stars

Comic-book Kipling: Mowgli the Wolf-boy, the Black Jungle, the Monkey City. The initial half-hour or so is a well-crammed phantasmagoria of eye-widening images: the runaway tandem of horses dragging a burning remnant of an exploded buckboard through the jungle; the ...

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Rockshow: Wings Over America None stars

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I Saw the Devil 0.0 stars

Gore and idiotic plotting from South Korean director Kim Ji-woon. A pregnant woman is butchered by a sexual psychotic, then the creep exchanges ambushes and sadistic shockers with a “special agent” who is (of course) the woman’s fiancé. Apart from ...

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Bad Company 0.0 stars

A black-market-nuclear-bomb scenario played for laughs. Or anyway Chris Rock plays it that way, while the rest of the cast plays it more or less straight. Rock, a Madison Square Garden ticket scalper and Washington Square chess hustler (like Laurence ...

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Gasoline 1.0 stars

Lesbian gas-station attendants hit the road, with a body in the trunk, after one accidentally kills the other's mother. Meager budget and narrative, but resourceful direction within those limits by the first-time Italian filmmaker, Monica Lisa Stambrini. With Maya Sansa ...

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The Human Stain 1.0 stars

Robert Benton's adaptation of a Philip Roth novel feels incontrovertibly bookish: the Big Themes (American race relations, moral hypocrisy, political correctness), the vast historical canvas (Vietnam, World War II), the contextual co-ordinates from current affairs (Viagra, Clinton-Lewinsky), the academic setting ...

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The Van 1.0 stars

Final installment in novelist Roddy Doyle's "Barrytown Trilogy" (director Stephen Frears came on board with the middle one, The Snapper, in the wake of Alan Parker's The Commitments): two unemployed pals team up in a mobile fast-food enterprise, and learn ...

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Mad City 1.0 stars

Costa-Gavras reworks Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (a/k/a The Big Carnival) for the age of television. The situation in the 1951 film was a man trapped in a caved-in mine; the situation now is a hostage crisis in the ...

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