Contorted spoof of the early Bond films, or of previous spoofs of them, which of course were spoofs to begin with. Already the satirical aim can be seen to be shaky, and the persona of the superspy as a stereotyped Sixties "swinger" (it says so right on his license plate) …
Mike Myers's one-joke comedy, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, is stretched into a sequel. And not only has the richest source of material already been pretty well tapped out -- the anachronism of a swinging Bondian superspy in the Nineties -- it is now also pretty well abandoned, with …
Before the credits fade, Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) is reporting on Ivana Trump’s allegations of rape against her husband. So much for fair and balanced coverage — which in the case of Trump-bashing, wouldn’t be bad. But like Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), the lecherous architect of the cable news channel …
Softened, mushed-up remake of a rather distasteful French farce, called here The Dinner Game, concerning a clique of fat cats who periodically convene for a soirée to which each of them for their shared amusement brings along an unwitting idiot to compete for the laurel of biggest idiot. For the …
Austin Powers, a decent idea for a skit, was overextended in his first feature film, and every subsequent sequel can only extend the overkill. There is already, in just the second sequel, a "Twelve Days of Christmas" feeling of picking up baggage as we go. (Did we really need to …
Twenty-five, thirty years earlier, a cast of Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand would have tilted the earth's axis. Nowadays they -- or at any rate Hoffman and Streisand, pickups for the sequel to Meet the Parents, as the hippie-dippy, touchie-feelie, loosey-goosey parents of the groom-to-be -- are …
A bad-to-worse weekend for a male nurse named Focker (you'll need several sets of fingers and toes to count up the utterances of that name), who accompanies his prospective fiancée to his prospective sister-in-law's wedding. The women, including the prospective mother-in-law, virtually fade into the woodwork, as all attention centers …
A frozen small town's Saturday-afternoon tradition of an intramural hockey game gets written up in Sports Illustrated by a bumptious one-time resident of the place: "On pure skating ability, the boys of Mystery, Alaska rival any team in the NHL." No sooner said than the New York Rangers are booked …
Was blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston, enjoying himself) a self-serving, self-righteous Type A who confused the cause of social justice with his own desire to live well? Or was he a brilliant, pro-worker Good American who figured out how to keep the S.S. Good Conscience afloat during the Red …