The burnt-to-a-crisp and resurrected superhero from the Todd McFarlane comic books, and the HBO cartoon series, comes -- like a Batman out of Hell -- to live action, or at least partially live. His assorted powers -- his cape, his armor, his spikes, his chains -- and his shapeshifting enemies …

An innocent man tosses a pocketbook containing a very important clue to the crime over the railing and into a passing garbage truck for a trio of adolescent dump-dwellers to find. When the mob comes looking for the mystery wallet, the kids are noticeable in their absence. Thus begins a …

Kiefer Sutherland's unambitious directing debut, a lamsters-and-hostages item ("Shut the fuck up!" "We're fucked!" etc.), overdependent on head shots. The complications are more than the novice can handle. (There's an undercover agent in the group: what's he waiting for?) The hardest thought seems to have gone into the selection of …

It's not hard to figure out why the promotional campaign trumpets "from Executive Producer Terrence Malick" for writer-director Julio Quintana's story of a ruined seaside village where all the women started wearing black (and stopped getting pregnant) after a wave claimed several dozen schoolchildren. (Well, all the women except one: …

A somewhat livelier movie about the stock market than "Rollover" -- praise so faint that it would do better just to lie down with a cool washcloth pressed to its forehead. And Michael Douglas, while no less of a Leftish actor happy to cut his own character's throat, is a …

Wanting to be taken more seriously as an actor and director, Emilio Estevez navigates a well-marked short cut: to Vietnam, and to the tempestuous readjustment of a war vet to civilian life. The dynamic of the central family of four is credible, especially in the ways in which hurt can …

Martin Sheen plays Tom, an American doctor who comes to St. Jean Pied de Port, France to collect the remains of his adult son, killed in the Pyrenees in a storm while walking The Camino de Santiago, also known as The Way of Saint James. Driven by his profound sadness …

A linear film about a doctor (Martin Sheen) who goes to France for the body of his son (Sheen’s real son, Emilio Estevez, who directed). To honor him and to shake his own life out of torpor (golf isn’t enough), he carries the ashes on a foot trek down the …

Documentarist Chris Paine investigates the automotive murder, and finds, as in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, many bloody hands: the oil industry, the car companies, the federal government, the consumer, et al. Essentially this is in the nature of a TV news-magazine talking-head report, and it doesn't do …