Four chums of a catatonic cuckold devise a plan to help him regain his manhood: abduct the offender so that the offended may exact revenge. An initial hint of stylishness yields to staginess, despite the flashbacks, the fantasies, and the illustrative footage from Cecil B. De Mille’s Samson and Delilah. …
This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
Omnibus movies -- those composed of several individual segments by several individual directors -- can pose a special critical problem, presenting works of wildly different merits under one unifying title. But it perhaps is silly to worry about this, or even to mention it, when the overriding idea is as …
Rowan Joffe wrote and directed this adaptation of the Graham Greene novel about warring mobster gangs in England, circa 1964. The crime element is merely backdrop to the film’s real interest, a dysfunctional love story between a psychotic young mob boss and a sheltered waitress, desperate to be his moll. …
Scenic World War II romance between a Greek island beauty (the Spanish Penelope Cruz, with her unaltered native accent) and a music-loving Italian officer (Nicolas Cage, with an unsteady Italian one). Shades, or shimmers rather, of Mediterraneo -- though it ultimately turns much darker. Slow, somewhat soggy, but rewarding in …
Starry-eyed science fiction, seemingly designed or destined to be blurbified into a "2001 for the Nineties" — complete with otherworldly light show and a solarized encounter with a Higher Intelligence. The very opening of the movie lays out the fictional terrain — light-years and light-years of it — as we …
Squeeee! Tom Baker! David Tennant! John Hurt as The War Doctor! Squeee!
Danish director Lars von Trier follows up Dancer in the Dark with another unrecognizable portrait of America. A pedantic or facetious moral tale, it takes place in Depression-period costume on a sparse and stylized stage set, which from overhead looks like a near life-sized blueprint of a tiny town in …
Hellish vision of Victorian England, smoke and flame all over the place, with Hammer horror director Freddie Francis returning to the cinematographer's seat he used to occupy, and working masterfully in black-and-white as he did in The Innocents, Room at the Top, Sons and Lovers, and as few people know …
The Irish psyche unfurled in a squabble over a patch of green, which an "outsider" from America wants to cover in concrete. For all its smallness, a movie of tall corn -- of mechanical dramaturgy (see the auction scene, where the American hides under an umbrella until "Fifty pounds once, …
A match made in heaven (or in that corner of it in charge of pestilences and poxes): the brassiness of director Bob Clark and the abrasiveness of actor Judd Nelson, combined for a comedy about a yuppie lawyer who won't let either youth or professionalism stand in the way of …
Alias H.B., alias Red, alias Big Monkey -- a horned demon unleashed by the Nazis and harnessed by the forces of good (namely the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense), his horns filed down to unmenacing stumps. A jokey comic-book adaptation (Dark Horse Comics) with delusions of grandeur. Guillermo Del …