WWII adventure from John Milius, about an American deserter who becomes a tribal leader in Borneo and is conscripted by the British to battle the Japanese. Based on a novel by Pierre Schoendoerffer, himself a filmmaker, and an artist of finer sensibility -- a sort of junior Conrad -- than …

Gangster Squad may lack brains and heart, but it's got guts. You get to see 'em right at the outset, when a Chicago crook who dares to cross power-mad Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen (a guttural Sean Penn) gets ripped in half by a couple of sedans. (Then again, you …

The producer-director team of Merchant-Ivory (not to forget writer Jhabvala) return, seventeen years after The Bostonians and twenty-two after The Europeans, to Henry James. A maturer James, and a maturer Merchant-Ivory, too. Inasmuch as it's James, it is guaranteed to have a rich, loamy, fertile situation, a variation on the …

Loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur, loose as ashes (to steal a line from Bing Crosby). The hero looks to be the brainchild of an intellectually precocious adolescent, one who has immersed himself in Raymond Chandler -- although these days it might be Robert Parker or Lawrence Block …

A skit comedian who works best in five-minute spurts produces and stars in a feature length film based on a short story. It’s The Children’s Minute when a pair of spiteful teenage girls play matchmaker for one of their fathers (Guy Pearce, as a nowhere-near recovering alcoholic) and an invisible, …

Somewhere it has been said that this is an insult to Jack Kerouac. But except for that, there is not a lot to recommend the movie; and even that would seem a stronger point if one could be surer that Jack Kerouac would have been pervious to insult. The not-a-lot …

Righteous recounting of the internecine strife between the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda in the early 1990s, and the resulting genocide as the world twiddled its thumbs. Sort of a cross between The Killing Fields and Schindler's List, it mercilessly plays the shame game ("Rwanda is not worth a …

Any concerns over the involvement of director Ang Lee in a Marvel Comics project turn out to be not unwarranted. These concerns get immediately stirred up in the opening credits when you see, and hear, that the musical score has been ceded to Danny Elfman, who seems to have a …

James L. Brooks's bow to popular opinion. His movie started out as a musical, and went barreling ahead as one, until it was tried out in front of preview audiences. Their resistance to it was such that all the musical numbers got thrown out, except for the one of the …

Star vehicle. More precisely, a bicycle built for two, and pedaled across two types of terrain, George Cukor's and Alfred Hitchcock's. To put it as dauntingly as possible: Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts, in the roles of rival reporters on a train-wreck story, are required to be Tracy and Hepburn …

A movie for those who just want to be transported to another time and place, never mind what there is to do upon arrival. Lacking a renowned novel as a guidebook, the team of James Ivory (director), Ismail Merchant (producer), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer) jump off from a base …

The big question: Is Nick Nolte's Italian accent enough to ruin the movie, or is it not enough? The big answer: Not enough. And Susan Sarandon and Kathleen Wilhoite as his redheaded ("Murphy-haired") wife and sister-in-law do heroic damage-control. The true tale of a couple's search for a treatment for …

Another quietly offbeat project for actor-turned-director Keith Gordon (The Chocolate War, A Midnight Clear), a somber and somnolent treatment of the irony-laden Vonnegut novel about an American spy in wartime Germany, to outward appearances employed, where he can do more harm than good, as a Nazi radio propagandist who nightly …

Back in the good old days of carte blanche police brutality: L.A. in the early Fifties, in the company of the four felt-hatted musketeers -- the hard-punching untouchables -- of Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn. (The New Zealand director, Lee Tamahori, proven poet of bar fights and …

Lifeless bisexual love triangle out of a Michael Chabon novel. The musty bookishness begins with the nagging first-person narration of a good-looking dullard (“After you’ve thrown up in the topiary and rinsed your mouth out with cheap vodka, you really don’t want to talk to anybody”), but it continues even …