Three of them, directed at low intensity by Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. No one would accuse Scorsese, for his part, of holding anything back in the way of technical virtuosity: you get slow motion and fast cuts; you get low angles and high ones; you get a …
Ole Bornedal's American re-do of his own Danish thriller about a necrophiliac serial killer and the hapless morgue attendant who falls under suspicion. In this, Bornedal is following the route of the Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer and The Vanishing, except that as the Bornedal original went uncirculated in America, the …
Peter Gent's roman-à-clef about the Dallas football organization is as single-voiced on the screen as on the page -- a defeat for the collaborative possibilities of filmmaking. One might have hoped, for instance, that the producer and former president of Paramount Pictures, Frank Yablans, who takes partial credit for the …
The final installment in the Polish brothers' place-name trilogy (Twin Falls Idaho and Jackpot, earlier) is without doubt something different, but that doesn't mean it isn't something awful, a lugubrious curio about the evacuation of a desert town in the shadow of a proposed dam in the mid-Fifties, while at …
A population of computer-cartoon Cute Critters, plasticky, foam-rubbery, styrofoamy, and styled to please the eye of the pre-schooler, teaches the lesson that oneness beats aloneness. There are some elaborate and well-timed visual gags, pretty awful to look at nonetheless. The buzzed-up squirrel, not unlike the squirrel in the first Ice …
Director Taylor Hackford gives author Donald Westlake's famous thief another crack at the big screen. The effort probably won't make anyone forget Lee Marvin in Point Blank, but it just might eclipse Mel Gibson's Payback. Parker is a man of principle; if he weren't played by Jason Statham in perpetual …
Athletic inspirationalism by way of the Buddhist school of thought, a dizzyingly loopy path. The slo-mo nightmare of a world-class gymnast -- drops of perspiration detonating at the volume of thunder, his right leg shattering like crystal on his dismount from the rings -- comes more or less true, and …
A feelie. Repressed South Carolina man is summoned to New York City to consult with his suicidal sister's psychiatrist; falls in love with the psychiatrist, teaches her snotty teenage son some football, teaches her snooty violinist husband some manners, learns something about himself, too, and returns to his family a …
Screen transplant of a Sam Shepard stage play: an interminable tease about something that happened in the long-buried past, something to do with a horse-racing scam, something criminal, something "pornographic," something documented in a heavily taped-up shoebox. Untasty tidbits of it are doled out in flashback, with younger actors so …
Time is divided between broad satire, or outright farce, and earnest preachment of the type in made-for-TV "issue" movies. (At issue: a breach-of-promise lawsuit brought by an illiterate high-school grad against his alma mater.) Arthur Hiller, who once upon a time directed Hospital, seems to want to do something of …
Terrence Malick's adaptation of James Jones's WWII novel also marks his return to the director's chair after a vacation of twenty years: too heavy a weight for any movie, or moviemaker, to carry. One of the problems with Malick's earlier works -- the crutch of voice-over narration -- is here …
Another Hollywood raid on the French cinema, this time with the full co-operation (directing, writing, executive producing) of the original filmmaker, Francis Veber. It says something about the state of the art in the 1980s that Hollywood should be so impressed with inferior French imitations of Hollywood at its fluffiest: …
Alias Miss Malaprop 2000, alias the Mistress of the Mixed Metaphor, a self-described "private defective," a peerless gum-chewer if not gumshoe, who stumbles upon a case of political chicanery while employed as a security guard at a Pacific Northwest casino. "You're out of your rocker," "ya gotta grab the bull …
Major-studio satire on a major-studio Vietnam War epic. The slipshod plotting, the willful misinformation about how movies are made, and the pandering to the groundlings do not close off all avenues of inspiration. Four fake trailers at the top of the movie, introducing the motley cast of the movie-within-the-movie, give …