The Marine Captain's wife, thinking to make herself useful while her man is away in Vietnam, takes a nonpaying job in the veterans' hospital. There, she undergoes a radical character change (symbolized by her going from straight hair to frizzy) and falls in love with a bitter wheelchair case who, …
This, the fourth of the Airports, continues the steady climb into thinner and thinner air. It concerns a billionaire arms manufacturer who launches repeated midair attacks on the Concorde airliner, en route from Washington to Moscow, in order to eliminate one of its passengers, his girlfriend, who is in possession …
A former rodeo champion (Robert Redford) endures endless degradation as a commercial ambassador for a breakfast cereal, protecting himself from the blows to his pride by keeping himself pickled to the gills. When he sees that his corporate bosses have in mind the same sort of tawdry show-biz career for …
Kristen Wiig’s performance adds a new dimension to frazzled, but the closer the former skit-comedian inches toward big screen stardom, the more far-flung her choice of star vehicles becomes. Dumped by her boyfriend and unable to maintain a job writing descriptive blurbs for a New York magazine, Wiig feigns suicide …
Babs dearest. Barbra Streisand could write her own first-class ticket on any project in Tinseltown but instead chooses to ride shotgun for Seth Rogen in this terminally cute justification for matricide. Rogen — an uptight organic chemist shopping around a new environmentally safe cleaning product — decides to play Cupid …
David Spade's "white-trash idiot" looks all right in the externals: the metal-band T-shirts, the haircut "like Jane Fonda in Klute." But his creamy-nougat center seems dictated by Adam Sandler's Secrets of Success (Sandler, indeed, is one of the executive producers); and the hot blonde in blue-jean cutoffs (Brittany Daniel: she …
There's a sense of strain about elongating this wispy tale -- one of Lillian Hellman's many published memories -- to two hours' length; but in that strain, this movie shows its "heart." The gravest problems here are structural -- specifically, the flashbacks, which impart no useful information, which introduce two …
Jane Fonda is allowed to talk out much of her characterization of a pricey Manhattan call girl, by way of tape recordings, phone calls, psychiatric sessions. But while maintaining a sympathetic and an open ear, director Alan Pakula appears to be distracted by the problems of fitting her, just so, …
After an absence of fifteen years, Jane Fonda returns to an altered Hollywood landscape (no Julia, no Comes a Horseman, no They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, anywhere in sight) for a frivolous star vehicle, teamed with, or rather pitted against, Jennifer Lopez in what amounts to an extended catfight: an …
Not much good as a whodunit: there are too few characters (i.e., suspects) in it for that. It is much more a "character" and "relationship" thing, concerning a high-strung and hard-drinking Hollywood has-been (or never-was: "They were grooming me," she boasts, "to be the new Vera Miles") and a casually …
Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin star as estranged friends who reunite to seek revenge on the petulant widower (Malcolm McDowell) of their recently deceased best friend. Along the way, Fonda’s character reunites with her great love (Richard Roundtree) as each woman learns to make peace with the past and each …
Cunning piece of popular entertainment, pushing the proper buttons to bring out the grievances of almost everybody toward their bosses, and particularly those of secretaries. At its laziest, it settles for illustrating dog-eared pages out of the feminist primer. Certainly, it gives up any pretense of honest observation in its …
The title role is the Ambrose Bierce of legend, who threw over the literary life and vanished without trace in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. It's a difficult role to fill, because it, like Bierce himself, is so much hot air. But Gregory Peck, calling on all his stature, …
A drive through the Parisian countryside with Catherine Deneuve at the wheel of director and cowriter Emmanuelle Bercot’s formless flivver. One reel of backstory, another squandered in search of a pack of smokes, and it’s time to gift La Deneuve with a solid audition reel for the American sequel to …
A newly divorced lawyer (Catherine Keener) goes to see her grandkids in Woodstock, New York, which leads her into the rainbow afterglow of the hippie era as personified by Jane Fonda. Bruce Beresford directed the comedy; featuring Elizabeth Olsen, Rosanna Arquette, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Nat Wolff.