Sleek, fast-moving, and, even though it appears at times to be getting reckless and out of control (stay calm, have patience), really quite adroitly handled espionage tale. The plot, which sends a broadcaster for Free World Radio ("The Voice That Speaks the Truth") on a perilous mission beyond the Berlin …
The USS Nimitz, on routine maneuvers in the Pacific, encounters a bit of time turbulence, so to call it, and emerges on the other side the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, with a full arsenal of nuclear-age armaments and a chance to rewrite the history books. "It …
Stephen King, on the overwhelming evidence of the movie adaptations, can seldom be bothered to develop one of his ideas, but then the ideas are seldom worth developing in the first place. The idea here -- the terrible burdensomeness of supernatural powers on their possessor -- is pretty much the …
The project that Richard Attenborough tried to bring to fruition for twenty years turns out to have gotten done in the style of twenty years earlier, the style of a David Lean roadshow: there are no reserved seats, actually, and no musical overture or souvenir program, but there's an intermission, …
Three-and-three-quarter-hour Civil War epic from Ronald F. Maxwell, writer and director also of Gettysburg: eight hours all told. Although it was made ten years later, and although the action takes place earlier, many of the same actors have been retained in the same roles (e.g., Jeff Daniels, C. Thomas Howell, …
That's the name the occupying army has bestowed on the "weekend party palace" of Saddam's son, Uday, complete with swimming pool, fishing pond, putting green, and bomb damage. Documentarian Michael Tucker, narrating the action in the ominous amplified murmur of Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, lived there for two months …
Elementary suspenser: stolen rare coin, crooked cop, deaf lady in distress. (We have already had a blind lady in distress in a suspenser called -- wouldn't you know? -- See No Evil.) Instruction on the world of the deaf rises just enough above elementary to show you how to sign …
Investment advice from the mouth of a seven-year-old babe, relaying tips from invisible friends beneath a security blanket. Eddie Murphy, as the profiting father who learns to value his daughter for more than money, seems often foolish, occasionally peevish, never actually funny. With Yara Shahidi, Thomas Haden Church, Nicole Ari …
The size of this is beyond me, comments New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the course of his probe into the Kennedy assassination. And to the extent that writer-director Oliver Stone identifies himself with his lone-voice hero, truer words were never spoken. Essentially the movie is simply a remake …
The chain-rattling spirit of The Golden Age of Television rattles on: a foursquare (or just plain square) presentation of the facts in the case of an East German refugee who hijacked a Polish airliner to fly to freedom. Can hijacking, even in a sympathetic cause, be condoned? Can hiding expository …
One of the hard lessons of growing up, we learn at the end of this Erich Segal tearjerker, is that nobody is perfect. But people in Erich Segal tearjerkers come close. The titular man, for instance, is chairman of a university Humanities department, bribes potential drop-outs with guaranteed A's, and …
Tough-talking, improvisational-sounding punks (fuck this, fuck that) in a rough part of Boston. Several shakes of ersatz Scorsese, a pinch or two of imitation Tarantino, and nothing at all to identify filmmaker Ted Demme as his own man. With Denis Leary, Ian Hart, Noah Emmerich, Famke Janssen, Colm Meaney, Martin …
It makes a nice story, that Susanna Styron has transferred to the screen a short story by her father William, but it doesn't make such a nice movie — a groaningly stretched-out anecdote about a ninety-nine-year-old former slave who returns to the farm in Old Virginny to die. Careful Depression-period …
The first feature-length film of music-video veteran Mary Lambert, but only by grace of her earlier dismissal -- for "artistic differences," one supposes -- from Prince's Under the Cherry Moon. If nothing else, this movie will stand as a monument to Prince's artistic good sense. There is surely very little …