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 …
More disappointing than most Adam Sandler comedies because the subject was more promising: temper control. You would hardly know that that's the subject from the way the humor runs to sex, private parts, bodily functions, in short the toilet. The strong supporting cast is a sign of either Sandler's growing …
Bill Norton's elegy on the L.A. counterculture seems to be in the right place at the right time, but lets the opportunity slip right between its legs. Some sidelong glances at the business of dope sales; some intense star-gazing at the twitches of Gene Hackman and the slouches of Kris …
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 …
The year is 1997, the entire island of Manhattan has been converted into a walled prison, and the black-shirted security police are headquartered at the foot of the Statue of Liberty (how ironic!). Things, in short, have changed a bit -- but director John Carpenter still has mashed potatoes for …
The simple-mindedness of the enterprise is pretty well symbolized by its taking of its title from a 1957 Robert Parrish masterpiece, without taking the double meaning at the same time. Steven Seagal, as an ecology cop on the trail of a toxic polluter, plops down his famous scowl, his famous …
Another in Robert Altman's series of struggles against innate staginess, orchestrated with his usual sloshing fluidity and trickly leaks around the edges, and permeated with his special vision of humanity as a matter of the askew bow tie and the visible lingerie strap. The theatrical source-material this time, set in …
John Carroll Lynch's directorial debut turned out to be 91-year-old Harry Dean Stanton's farewell performance. Death looms large, but don’t expect a downer. As sure and steadfast deliberate as the CG tortoise that closes the picture, it’s no surprise that Lynch’s tribute to the veteran Hollywood character actor is a …
Too calculatedly offbeat romance between a seedy guard-dog trainer and a classical soprano: raggedy bits of charm, humor, social comment are all steamrolled beneath rampant unbelievableness. It represents a more-than-twenty-year reunion of the director, writer, and star of Five Easy Pieces -- Bob Rafelson, Carol Eastman, Jack Nicholson -- but …
Hard-sell inspirationalism. A brainless hulk and a humpbacked little crippled genius form a bond in middle school. More than a bond, they form a unit: a piggyback entity self-dubbed "Freak the Mighty." (We're supposed to cheer when they dunk a basketball in gym class, but the editing convinces us it …
Clear attempt by the Disney people to produce something in the It's a Wonderful Life area; something that might reappear yearly and make the studio a tidy little Christmas bonus; something that might disseminate annual ennui and inspire a few extra seasonal suicides. Certainly more time and conviction go into …
This is a doughy lump of a soap opera pounded out to the specifications of a road movie; its director is an inveterate vagabond asked to do the job of a Mr. Fix-it. The outcome is often beautiful, more often artificial. One does not look to Wim Wenders for much …