Macedonian-born filmmaker Milcho Manchevski examines the civil war in his homeland in three torpid episodes, separate but slightly overlapping. (Someone, a different someone each time, throws up in each episode.) Feeling is buried undetectably under slick and flashy technique. With Rade Serbedzija, Katrin Cartlidge, Gregoire Colin, Labina Mitevska.
Robin Williams, in sad-clown mode, skips through history as a caveman, a Roman slave, a returning Crusader, a Portuguese shipwreck survivor, and a Manhattan slumlord. The segments do not amount to much individually, or add up to much collectively, though they all have their tender touches, each one more than …
Chabrol's oblique, ironic, politically incorrect, or politically independent, or simply apolitical, account of one woman's roundabout liberation. (The "unpleasant" movie about an abortionist, to which one character prissily refers, could well be Chabrol's own Story of Women.) Adapted from a Simenon novel, and a definite improvement on it. Interesting effect …
Grind-it-out sequel: just something to keep Eddie Murphy busy. The opening action sequence is well assembled, though it sets up a pattern of schizoid alternation between comedy and drama that persists throughout: immediately after the hero's boss expires in his lap, we plunge onward to airbag gags in the ensuing …
Day-trip from Birmingham to Blackpool, in a minibus packed with Indian women of wide-ranging ages and attitudes. Pleasant enough while it lasts (notwithstanding some overemphatic fantasy scenes, in mockery of the Bombay cinema, and a heavy-handed face-off with a wife-beater), but nothing much to remember the next morning. Colorful, bouncy, …
Screenwriter and first-time director Caroline Thompson's repayment of debt to one of her girlhood favorites, the Victorian perennial by Anna Sewell. It proceeds at a metronomic clip-clop pace, and there's very little narrative development: what little there is comes literally straight from the horse's mouth. ("It was cold and bright …
An inflationary Home Alone. Our flowering youth this time out is a millionaire home owner -- the million isn't really his, but the home is -- and the beleaguering bad guys are big league (Miguel Ferrer, Tone Loc, who deserve a better nemesis). Coincidence runs wild, but not as wild …
Superhero spoof about a nerdy black man who only seems mentally retarded, even (or especially) in his "secret identity" as a masked and caped "crimefighter," but who's actually an electronics wizard with the s-f gadgetry to prove it. The humor infrequently rises to silliness (the hero humming "background music" to …
Grind-it-out romantic thriller centered around a blind violinist who, no sooner than she receives a corneal transplant, becomes an eyewitness to a murder, albeit a blurry eyewitness, and hence a potential victim. In that nutshell, it sounds about right for Ingrid Bergman or Ida Lupino, if Ingrid or Ida swore …
Stephen Hopkins's ostensible salute to the Boston P.D. Bomb Squad frankly (and a tad hypocritically) hopes to hold its audience in their seats only with the promise of a forthcoming explosion. And another and another and another. Five major ones in all, padded a little by flashback replays. The bomber …
Worth seeing for the face-reddening, throat-constricting, vein-popping performance of Nick Nolte as a college basketball coach fashioned after Indiana U.'s Bobby Knight (who appears as himself in the climactic game, opposite Nolte on the sideline). At any rate he is fashioned after Knight up until he forges a Faustian pact …
Jessica Lange as the mood-swinging, not to forget hip-swinging, wife of a steadfast army guy (Tommy Lee Jones), ca. 1960. She fashions herself after BB and MM (or momentarily, when transferred from a base in Hawaii to one in Alabama, Bette Davis: "What a dump!"). She teases, she flaunts, she …
What a way to go. Director John Flynn has left behind the adult action of The Outfit and Rolling Thunder, never mind the social "issues" of The Sergeant and Touched, and has taken up pandering to adolescents: gadgets and special effects and hard-rock musical tracks. He manages to bestow a …
Terence Rattigan's musty, dusty stage piece about the mossbacked tyrant of Classical Languages, eased into an early and pensionless retirement. Albert Finney, with his barrel chest, his pudding face, and his kitchen-sink background, is not as natural a choice for the part as Michael Redgrave (in the 1951 screen treatment), …
Facetious hard-boiled romantic thriller about the percolating passion between an Angst-ridden celibate hitman, Anthony LaPaglia, and his fatalistic target, Mimi Rogers (amused, amusing). You can see the ending coming miles away, and you go slower and slower the closer you get. A couple of warmish woman-on-top sex bits. With Matt …