Post-apocalypse science fiction, or post-MTV anyway, with the world overrun by fugitives from a Billy Idol video. Brutal action, and plenty of it; frugal but functional ruins and rubble; laughably laconic dialogue; a reverberantly basso profundo villain, no less laughable; and a terrier-tense hero, who has to be bailed out …
There's an intriguing idea here, and director Gary David Goldberg never gets anywhere near it. The idea is identified (after apparently one diagnostic session with a psychiatrist) as "successful schizophrenia." A seventy-eight-year-old retiree, almost paralyzed by age and unable to make the least little move without the sharp command of …
The trail of a cop killer leads from L.A. via Oklahoma to a White Supremacist enclave in Colorado. The sketchy policework is padded out and burdened down with moral righteousness about the mission itself and Wambaugh-esque bathos about the hero (divorce, drinking, overdue bills). Some odd bits of casting: William …
An old-fashioned damsel-in-distress story, scarcely surprising considering it's literally an old damsel-in-distress story. The novel on which it is based was finished in 1963 by Charles Williams, one of a legion of American thriller writers -- the Edgar Allan Poe Brigade -- better appreciated in other parts of the globe …
Christmas action horror thriller directed by René Manzor.
A charismatic English teacher at a repressive prep school in the Fifties inspires his pupils to reconvene the long-defunct Dead Poets Society, a secret literary round-table "dedicated to sucking the marrow out of life" and to worshipping at the altar of Whitman, Byron, Keats -- the more romantic (blustery, sugary), …
Proof that the London stock exchange can inspire a movie as unexciting and unclear as the New York one (Rollover, Wall Street). Solid professional job by Derrick O'Connor as a booze-swilling and coke-sniffing old burn-out. Rebecca DeMornay, a sixty-watt soft-white glow amid the grim young men and chilly VDTs, is …
Serviceable low-budget sci-fi about a long-throated sea creature riled up by an ocean-floor research team. We don't get to see much of the monster -- though he causes no end of shipboard mechanical difficulties -- and when we do see him he always seems to be saying "ah-h-h." With Greg …
Heist comedy with an inadequate fund of ideas to establish it (and re-establish it) as a comedy. The dour Fred Gwynne looks more than ready for a change of approach. With Corbin Bernsen, Ruben Blades, Lou Diamond Phillips, and William Russ; written and directed by Jim Kouf.
Spike Lee voiced displeasure at being branded after his first film "the black Woody Allen," and in truth his ambitions, though no less large, run in a quite different direction (and at even a faster clip) than those of the maker of Interiors and September and such. Lee's third feature …
Variation on the late-Eighties theme of mind transference (or body transference or personality transference), effected this time by some faulty dream research. Newcomer Marc Rocco, paging in world-record time through the Movie Director's Handbook of Style, seizes the occasion to behave as if he were (or wished he were) Nicolas …
Four mental patients get a pass to the ballgame. Translation: Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, Peter Boyle, and Stephen Furst get a pass to bad acting. With Lorraine Bracco; directed by Howard Zieff.
Essentially a two-character piece -- a crotchety old Southern Jewess and her amiable black chauffeur -- based on a Pulitzer Prized play of typically slight distinction, cozy, comforting, demographically made-to-order for the upper-middle-class middlebrow Broadway theatergoer. Despite the efforts of Bruce Beresford (the Australian director on an extended Southern sabbatical: …
Something the cat dragged in -- a scruffy but not unappealing little movie, by Gus Van Sant, Jr., about a two-man, two-woman team of dope fiends who burglarize pharmacies to feed their habit. Its main tenor of amorphous, improvisational realism, its intermittent eruptions of high style and experimentation (the Wellesian …
Marlon Brando's fifteen-minute portrait of a Human Rights lawyer at work on a hopeless murder case in South Africa is a welcome dose of caginess in an otherwise artlessly direct protest film, with its burning gaze hardly wavering an inch from The Problem. (The lawyer's fondness for flowers in spite …