Over the past three years, Michael Keaton has created memorable characters in Birdman, Spotlight, The Founder, and even Spider-Man: Homecoming. So maybe he’s earned the right to bluster and snarl his way through this creaky, clichéd thriller about nuclear-minded terrorists, the secretly soulful killing machines who must hunt them down, …
The DC Comics superhero, inadequately incarnated in Michael Keaton. (Batbrat, maybe. Batpunk, perhaps. Batguy, at best.) Even so, the movie is indisputably an impressive thing to look at. The production (with its feel of futurism circa the 1940s: sort of what Brazil ought to have looked like) doesn't suffocate the …
Batman for a third time, to be more precise. Val Kilmer, even taking into account the overprocessed reproduction of his speaking voice, is an improvement over Michael Keaton in the title role. Or at least an improvement in the alter-ego role of Bruce Wayne, billionaire philanthropist. Once he's inside the …
Seventy-some-minute cartoon. The square-jawed, trapezoid-torsoed hero is more credible, certainly, than Michael Keaton, and the graphic style throughout is convincingly comic-bookish. But the animation is not really all that animated, and the story is slowed by flashbacks and romance. Voices by Kevin Conroy, Dana Delany, Mark Hamill.
Unfortunately he is still Michael Keaton. Or Michael Keaton is still him. And as long as he's in the lead role, any Batman movie will have to hobble along in leg irons. On the other hand, both The Penguin (Danny DeVito, unrecognizable) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) have imposing physical presences, …
Tim Burton oversees a lavish and garish horror comedy that captures the spirit of Halloween as deeply as, but no deeplier than, the Woolworth's costume department. Not for lack of expenditure. The best special effects that money can buy do not, however, come with any guarantee of charm -- one …
Tim Burton oversees a lavish and garish horror comedy that captures the spirit of Halloween as deeply as, but no deeplier than, the Woolworth's costume department. Not for lack of expenditure. The best special effects that money can buy do not, however, come with any guarantee of charm -- one …
Michael Keaton plays Riggan, a guy who used to be a box-office superstar, in part because he played Birdman in three films. (Art improving on life?) Now Riggan (like Keaton) is starring in much artier fare. Sadly, everything is going wrong, and he is routinely haunted by his feathery, famous …
Part public-service message and part private love-triangle. It covers twenty-one days at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and nine days of after-care; but despite the roughly proportionate allotment of screen time, it feels nearer to nine days inside and twenty-one days out. Or better, it feels near enough to …
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 …
Four mental patients get a pass to the ballgame. Translation: Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, Peter Boyle, and Stephen Furst get a pass to bad acting. With Lorraine Bracco; directed by Howard Zieff.
Second apolitical comedy in the same election year to deal with the wing-spreading of the President's only child, this girl heading west to college, in the footsteps of Chelsea Clinton, while her father campaigns for a second term. The film had the bad fortune to be beaten into the marketplace …
John Lee Hancock serves up a biopic of McDonald’s king Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton, just restrained enough as a ravenous dog in a human suit) that is not unlike the restaurant’s product: precisely prepared, brightly packaged (oh, that shot of the golden arches reflected in Kroc’s windshield as he pulls …
In the previous movie by this name, the American attitude toward the Japanese (with Randolph Scott showing the way) favored annihilation. This one, forty-odd years later, about a Japanese takeover of an American auto plant, inclines toward compromise. Which is not to say that the face-off between Japanese regimentalism and …
The '63 Volkswagen Bug with a mind of its -- er, his -- own (also a libido of his own: antenna coming to full alert at the sight of a late-model cab-yellow Beetle) is reclaimed from Crazy Dave's Scrap and Salvage and spruced up for the NASCAR circuit. Insipid kiddie …