Spongy satire divides its feeble forces between the Bush Administration (à clef) and the TV talent contest, American Idol, aligning the two targets when the mush-brained President agrees to appear as a guest judge on the season finale, a showdown pitting a "white-trash girl from Ohio" against an undercover Iraqi …
The remake of The Bad News Bears, minus the definite article, plugs in Billy Bob Thornton in the Walter Matthau part, a former professional baseball player and current full-time drunk, enlisted to coach a team of Little League rejects (now sponsored not by Chico's Bail Bonds, though that establishment gets …
The name of the movie is the name of a Mexican resort hotel-cum-hospital where half a dozen gringas await their turn to adopt native newborns; more bluntly, where the haves take from the have-nots. Or still more bluntly, where the Left-leaning John Sayles can show off some of his right …
Jon Hamm stars as the roguishly charming and endlessly troublesome Fletch, who becomes the prime suspect in a murder case while searching for a stolen art collection. The only way to prove his innocence? Find out which of the long list of suspects is the culprit - from the eccentric …
A pleasant outing in a Buick station wagon, comfortably seating five: Mom, Dad, Sis and her boyfriend, and the suspicious wife who, on the day after Thanksgiving, has discovered a cryptic note to her husband, quoting an Andrew Marvell love poem and signed "Sandy." What is the meaning of this? …
Writer and director Karen Moncrieff, of Blue Car, goes at the title figure -- not just dead, but brutally murdered -- by way of five separate storylines, one after another, some more tangential than others, all populated by horridly stunted humans. Structurally intriguing, but grindingly grim and condescending. With Toni …
Another tasteful collaboration of director Barbet Schroeder and his faithful photographer Luciano Tovoli, working chiefly in cool blues and battleship grays, with a subtle spreading of shadows. The taste ends there. The project -- the only known bone-marrow match for a policeman's leukemic son is an incarcerated psychopath -- is …
A pretentious mess from Tony Kaye (American History X). Lean, saint-faced Adrien Brody plays a school teacher rightly cynical about the dismal system. He compounds the daily crisis by encouraging the fantasies of a neurotic girl and nurturing a nymphetic drug whore (Sami Gayle). The story is alarmed gibberish, providing …
Matrimonial, as opposed to occupational, 9 to 5, with three high-wattage actresses exacting rah-rah revenge on the husbands who dumped them for younger women. The tripartite story -- an old, old, old story, too -- requires some laborious exposition and development. Each of the stars -- Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, …
Matrimonial, as opposed to occupational, 9 to 5, with three high-wattage actresses exacting rah-rah revenge on the husbands who dumped them for younger women. The tripartite story -- an old, old, old story, too -- requires some laborious exposition and development. Each of the stars -- Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, …
The Absent-Minded Professor remade to catch up with the decline of Western civilization: computer-cartoon special effects; a Star Wars-type sentimental robot; two Home Alone-type bungling goons; Robin Williams; etc. With Marcia Gay Harden, Christopher McDonald, Clancy Brown, Ted Levine; directed by Les Mayfield.
A modern dress mutation of High Noon with a pro-life message substituting for the “real time” western’s obvious allegory against blacklisting. Instead of a cowardly Marshal soliciting the aid of local townsfolk (including his girlfriend!), storming granny Lily Tomlin races against the clock, going hat-in-hand to various guest stars (including …
A tall tale about a tall tale, the bogus "authorized autobiography" of Howard Hughes, peddled by Clifford Irving to McGraw-Hill in the early Seventies. Richard Gere, as the hungering writer ("The middle of my life is at hand. I don't have a couch"), has some funny bits imitating Hughes's speech …
Illustration, in a sketchy hand, of the Jon Krakauer nonfiction book on Christopher McCandless, a 1990 college graduate, on the doorstep of Harvard Law School, who gave away his tuition fund to Oxfam, obliterated his identity, renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, and swapped the evils of society for the purity of …
Two guiltless fugitives (brothers-in-law: the married one's surname is Husband) fall into the sympathetic clutches of Dr. Chilblains, a cryonics crackpot who takes them out of their difficulties by flash-freezing them. They are awakened twenty-nine years later to different difficulties, in 1991. The debatable decision to make both men dimwits …