Elementary Rape Education, based very loosely on erroneous news accounts of an actual incident that reportedly took place in front of cheering onlookers in a public bar. (Is the pinball machine on which the rape here occurs -- about as ugly a scene, in about as many different ways, as …
Uncalled-for and uninspired retelling, without benefit of Yul Brynner or Broadway show tunes, of the clash of wits and wills between the Victorian-era widowed English governess and the progressive Siamese monarch-cum-polygamist. Jodie Foster has a painful-to-watch tenseness in her lips and jaw, perhaps under the strain of the British accent …
Distaff Death Wish, though it would not be strictly accurate to say that Jodie Foster is playing Charles Bronson. The emphasis is on her psychological wounds after her fiancé is beaten to death and she herself beaten to death's door -- setting up a take-back-the-night feminist revenge story -- and …
A novelty act: an all-juvenile cast, dolled up with double-breasted suits and slicked-down hair, re-enacts the underworld passions played out on the Warner Brothers lot in the Thirties by Cagney, Robinson, McHugh, Blondell, et al. The kids break into periodic song-and-dance routines, and the guns are loaded with lethal whipped …
A crafty, good-looking Roman Polanski film of a facile but entertainingly bitchy play by Yasmina Reza, sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? funneling into Who’s Afraid of Neil Simon? Two married couples (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) fume, spar, and rip apart their …
Satisfactory neither as documentary, which was the least that could have been expected of director Robert Kaylor (Derby), nor as a melodrama of the midway. What potential there was to delineate the mystique and the ambience and the inner workings of carnival life is pretty thoroughly siphoned off, soaked up, …
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 …
Catholic-school hellions in the 1970s. Peter Care's handling of alienated youth falls somewhere between Larry Clark and John Hughes, though it's not a fixed position: there's an uncertainty of tone and intent. Todd McFarlane's animated sequences, bringing the kids' superhero fantasies to fruition, tend toward flattery, but the performances of …
Suspenser in the tried-and-true pattern of the Boy Who Cried Wolf: a mendacious early adolescent (Matt O'Leary, vulnerable as required) who discovers that his well-heeled new stepdad (Vince Vaughn) is first of all a heel and next of all a psychopathic killer. The police might be forgiven for disbelieving that …
Another Tony Bill contemplation of violence and pacifism among the young (to go with My Bodyguard). But different. Very different. A sort of horror-comic vision of the Bronx in the Sixties, complete with a scarred Frankenstein's monster and an unconscious blonde in his arms. The interest of an Irish policeman's …
Airborne thriller gets off the ground in good shape, and while aloft adds another variation to the infinitude of locked-room mysteries. After taking her six-year-old daughter to stretch out in the empty back rows of a double-decker jumbo jet, the mother nods off and wakes up, midflight, to find her …
An update on the teenage rebellion at the start of the Eighties reveals that only the faces have changed. Four fifteen-year-old girls, reasonably well differentiated from one another, are dragged through an overstated but unmeaningful sequence of events and a storm of fancy photography: pale and powdery David Hamilton "studies" …
Disney remake of the magical, mystical mother-daughter switcheroo, adjusted for youth's further usurping of the culture since 1977. The ostensible original idea was for the representatives of both generations to see through the other's eyes, but the bias in the remake tilts strongly toward the younger. The girl is a …
Sequel to The Silence of the Lambs: long, slow, eventually revolting; less a fright film than an anguish film; somber, overinflated, operatic (it stresses the "grand" in Grand Guignol); no doubt a disappointment to people who actually wanted a sequel; of little interest to people who didn't. It could have …