Life’s circumstances cause a recently married gay couple (Alfred Molina and John Lithgow) to seek temporary housing with relatives while looking for a new place to live. Lithgow is deposited with Marisa Tomei and her maladjusted teenage son while Molina lands on the couch of a pair of hard-partying cops …
No you won’t. From Jessie Nelson, the man who brought us Stepmom, I Am Sam, and Fred Claus...need I go on? Staler than year-old rum cake and louder than June Squbb’s holiday sweater, Hollywood yet again ushers in the Christmas season with a dysfunctional family racing to get it together …
Writer-director Randall Miller incorporates sizable chunks of footage from his 1990 short of the same name, in the form of flashbacks to 1962, recollected by John Goodman in the present day as he lies dying in the back of an ambulance, victim of a car wreck en route to a …
Courtroom comedy about a Brooklyn ambulance chaser (who passed the bar exam six weeks earlier on his sixth attempt) on a murder case in Wazoo City, Alabama. The jokes -- mostly of the city-slicker-in-jerkwater-town variety -- can be seen coming from far enough off for boredom to set in before …
Coyly girlish romance (written by Diane Drake), dealing with soul mates, destiny, happiness ever after, and other pajama-party topics: it catches a wave in the wake of Sleepless in Seattle, and Norman Jewison throws in several shots of the night sky to remind you that he once directed Moonstruck. The …
Optimistically titled gangster farce. (Hoped-for critical blurbs: "Oscar's a winner!" "Oscar is the best!" "Oscar, meet Mr. Price and Mr. Waterhouse.") Some of the actors -- Peter Riegert, Tim Curry, Chazz Palminteri, particularly -- get a lot of chewing out of the driest old bones: mistaken identities, switched satchels, etc., …
Director Ron Howard continues to toss and turn and sweat profusely in the grips of bestselleritis: one of those multi-character Arthur Hailey-type things, set this time in the exciting world of newspaper publishing (the fictitious New York Sun: "It Shines for All"), where every day brings a new deadline, a …
A nonstop joke machine (Billy Crystal) and his equally overbearing wife (Bette Midler) are forced to spend time with their work-obsessed daughter (Marisa Tomei), son-in-law (Tom Everett Scott), and a trio of estranged grandchildren, all of whom have Dr. Kevorkian on speed-dial. The set-up seemed idiot-proof: stick a pair of …
An accent movie: Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, and Alfred Molina doing different degrees of Desi Arnaz -- Tomei doing the most, doing too much ("Doan be dreeDEEcooluss!"). Mira Nair, who looked at the immigrant experience of her fellow Indians in Mississippi Masala, here looks at the immigrant experience of Cubans …
A spoof, not of religion but of the bloated excesses of religion in a media-driven, mega-church era. Pierce Brosnan is a suave fundamentalist fool, the Rev. Day. He runs afoul of a righteous aetheist (Ed Harris), thrills a suburban fan (Jennifer Connelly), and bewilders her doofy husband (Greg Kinnear). The …
Composer Steven Lauddem is creatively blocked and unable to finish the score for his big comeback opera. At the behest of his wife, Patricia, formerly his therapist, he sets out in search of inspiration and finds much more than he bargained for. Directed by Rebecca Miller, starring Anne Hathaway, Marisa …
A comedy of family shame, rooted in the personal experience of filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and accordingly set in 1976. The premise is full of potential, even if some of that potential is down the lower road of a weekly TV sitcom. A single dad, old enough to be regularly mistaken …
Desperately cute romantic comedy revolving around an unlucky-in-love career girl (Ashley Judd: is she trying to be cute, too, when she twice pronounces "realtor" as "real-a-tor"?) who develops a "New Cow Theory," whereby men are posited to be like bulls in their boredom with prior sexual partners: "neophiliacs." The heedlessly …
We watch (and listen to) Gena Rowlands talking to herself, delivering the morning papers, pulling her car up ten feet (or, through the telephoto lens, what looks like ten inches) and stopping again, getting out, talking to herself, delivering more papers, and we get tired of the movie before the …
Beauty-and-Beast romance (more the Beauty and the Beast TV series than any other version: the withdrawn watchdog in his subterranean haven) between a Minneapolis coffee-shop waitress with "too good a heart" and a scraggly-haired busboy with a medically "bad" heart. The image is too soft and smeary for the blue-collar …