Well, once in a while, maybe. Steven Spielberg's remake and update of Guy Named Joe, a WWII fantasy about the ghost of a recently deceased flyer who (unbeknown to anyone alive) tutors a neophyte flyer and even plays matchmaker between that neophyte and his own former sweetheart, loses some of …
The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
Smooth, smug, half-smart. That description doesn't just fit Michael Douglas in the title role, but the movie as a whole, a retro romantic comedy that engineers a meet-cute (and a continuing date-cute) between the Democratic widower in the Oval Office and a married-to-career hatchet woman for an environmental lobby. ("I …
The sequel to Stakeout goes the way of the Lethal Weapon series: into escalating silliness. (Even the title, copied from Another 48 Hrs., is not a novel way for a sequel to go.) Enlisting stand-up comedian Rosie O'Donnell and her audible gasp makes the intentions perfectly clear. The most actual …
When writer-director Mike Mills isn’t flashing oodles of perky technique and “stylish” doodads (drawings, meet-cutes, old news clips, vintage music), his talented cast inserts human value and charm into this tale of a nice, lonely guy (Ewan McGregor) who lost his suddenly gay, then dead dad (Christopher Plummer) and finds …
At the heart of this up-to-date private eye caper is the question, Whatever happened to the student radicals of the Sixties? And the several given answers are not lacking in humor, nor in sentimentalism for the good old days of peace marches, SDS meetings, and such. That one of these …
Steven Spielberg surpasses all of his sci-fi forerunners in the only way he knows how in material things. He has costlier, more spectacular special effects, including some really wonderful nighttime skies; he has bigger and brighter spaceships; he has louder sound effects and background music; and he has the largest …
Can love bloom and grow between two rivals in what is ballyhooed as the Super Bowl of piano contests? and will his Beethoven beat out her Mozart (or will she opt at the last minute for Prokofiev?)? and will the outcome hurt their chances for happiness? and, most suspensefully of …
Based loosely on Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, this is Paul Mazursky's second attempt at a transatlantic transplant (the first was Willie and Phil, from Truffaut's Jules and Jim) -- and better luck this time. In fact, better luck than the original. The anarchic vagabond and the bourgeois home he …
Two Manhattan sublessees meet, fight, and finally fall for one another — a supposedly heart-warming romance written in Neil Simon's glib, unctuous, hard-sell style. Simon certainly knows the rules of the Well-Made Play and that rat-a-tat rhythm of wisecracks and comebacks; he has a ready fund — as big as …
The Boy Wonder of silent movies has been reduced to directing stag films downstairs in his own home, while the sounds of freeway construction, off in the distance, threaten imminent destruction. Some of the feelings for Hollywood's Golden Age and for the dilemma of the commercial artist, sullied but still …
Mixed-media adaptation (live action, cartoon, stop-motion animation) of the Roald Dahl children's book, from the Disney studio, and more specifically from Henry Selick of Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas. The self-consciously "dreamlike" narrative concerns an unloved orphan who, accompanied by oversized English-speaking insects, sails off for the Big Apple …
How to cope with a rogue shark, who’s choosing his meals among the summertime beachgoers on a New England vacation isle, is a possibly plausible crisis, puffed up however to the proportions of a whopping fish story. The plot appears to be fooling with some fairly advanced chemistry (the hunting …