Alien crossed with Lifeforce: a literally lethal lady, and frequently naked one, who metamorphoses into a long-headed crustacean for the purposes of propagation. The rapidly unspooling plotline is mildly misogynistic: the creature starts out as a barely pubescent nymphet (first stirrings of feminine power), injected at birth with some extraterrestrial …
Serial-killer thriller about (brace yourself) a serial killer of serial killers. That's not some figure of speech synonymous with the serial killer's serial killer, or the serial killer to beat all serial killers, or the mother of all serial killers, or some such. It means literally that he serially kills …
Moses v. Pharoah: WHO WILL WIN? Ben Kingsley narrates; Christian Slater is Moses; Alfred Molina is Pharoah, and Elliot Gould is the voice of God.
The coming of age of a superhero in a family of superheroes: the Tracys, a/k/a Thunderbirds, collectively International Rescue, headquartered on a secret South Pacific island. The British TV puppet show of the 1960s goes live-action and loses all individuality. With Brady Corbet, Ben Kingsley, Bill Paxton, Anthony Edwards, Sophia …
A couple of Iowa missionaries in China take the long and scenic route home on the Beijing-to-Moscow rail line, and the along the way fall in with drug runners. Director Brad Anderson tames his shaky camera for some recognizably Hitchcockian suspense sequences. With Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, Eduardo Noriega, Kate …
Soporific costume farce, after Marivaux, directed by Clare Peploe, in washed-out color (blown-up 16mm), gashed with nervous little jump-cuts (very short jumps), propped up and hustled along by the music of Rameau. There's a fair amount of alternative-lifestyle titillation: cross-dressing; a woman (disguised as a man) pitching woo to a …
Jay Russell's treatment of the Natalie Babbitt children's novel posits a backwoods family with a private Fountain of Youth (more than that, a Fountain of Indestructibility), and it weighs the merits of an eternal life ("What we Tucks have, you can't really call living. We just are. We're like rocks …
A very sweet (a little too, no doubt, for some tastes) adaptation of the Russell Hoban novel, directed by John Irvin, from a script by Harold Pinter. A relationship between a man and a woman that's founded on nothing but their mutual desire to liberate three sea turtles after thirty …
Closeups, sunlight, and a Victorian setting are of no benefit to Shakespeare's flimsy masquerade of cross-dressing and mistaken sexual identity. The language, naturally, is full of delights, and Helena Bonham Carter does nicely with it, but she's not the one who must wear the mustache. Imogen Stubbs, Nigel Hawthorne, Imelda …
Summer vacation after high school and before college: a romance blossoms between a teenage dope peddler and his classmate client, and a bond of friendship forms between the former and the latter’s father, a crazy mixed-up psychiatrist. The action is set back in 1994, but that’s no excuse for the …
James Marsh’s Man on Wire — the superb Academy Award-winning documentary account of the death-defying stroll that high-wire artist Philippe Petit took between the Twin Towers back in 1974 — is given a fantasy thrill-ride makeover by Hollywood motion capture champion Robert Zemeckis (Flight). Saddled with a French accent, Michigan …
Topical satire on privatized warfare in the Middle East, “satire” being defined as a fictional form that depends on your political sympathies overriding your aesthetic standards. Even if your sympathies are in perfect alignment, however, this one seems a complete misfire, resorting to fisheye lenses for comic emphasis, mock-Morricone spaghetti-Western …
It has a rather weighty science-fiction component: the time-honored theme of the superiority of emotional humans to unemotional superhumans. But then it's supposed to be funny in addition. The idea -- fairly intelligent for a Hollywood comedy, which might help explain its pratfall at the box-office -- is to take …
Sherlock Holmes remodelled, but not improved. Dr. Watson is now an actual man, and an author and deductive genius to boot. Holmes is his invention, impersonated in real life by a ham actor, and "a gambler, a womanizer, and a drunkard." (This pretty well cuts Conan Doyle out of the …