Ripley, believe it or not, has been cloned from a drop of her own blood, with new superhuman strength as befits her stature as a Cultural Icon. But it is not for herself that she has been brought back from the dead. It is for the alien queen inside her, …
Special pleading on behalf of nonunion janitors, mostly immigrant, in a downtown L.A. high-rise. British filmmaker Ken Loach has lost a little complexity, a little reality, in his move to a new neighborhood: Eisensteinian caricatures of bosses and fat cats; a meet-cute and "sweet" romance between the Anglo activist and …
Bloated fantasy, set in a dark dank Nowheresville, further removed from the World As We Know It through the overuse of wide-angle lenses. A mad inventor -- isolated on a man-made floating island in the company of identical sextuplets, a matronly midget, and a disembodied brain inside a tank of …
The opening passage, with a tough, near-mute little scrapper (Leo Howard as “Young Conan”) beating the snot out of every adult the script throws him, held promise. As the full-grown barbarian, all the insufferably preening Jason Momoa can muster is a hint of Ashton Kutcher on steroids. The filmmakers wisely …
From a narrated prologue that relates how a Renaissance alchemist fled to Vera Cruz during the Spanish Inquisition, how he tinkered away on a secret invention, and how he met his fate in a cave-in in 1937(!), the action proceeds with cautious pace and meticulous circumstantiation into what amounts to …
Alias H.B., alias Red, alias Big Monkey -- a horned demon unleashed by the Nazis and harnessed by the forces of good (namely the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense), his horns filed down to unmenacing stumps. A jokey comic-book adaptation (Dark Horse Comics) with delusions of grandeur. Guillermo Del …
A black mark on the record of director Guillermo del Toro, whose record, which started out so clean with Cronos in his native Mexico and Mimic in the Hollywood system, looks now a bit ink-stained: Blade II, the first and second Hellboy, and nothing else that comes close to those …
Second remake, at the least, of the H.G. Wells fable of the beast in man and vice versa, originally made in the early Thirties under the name of Island of Lost Souls. Marlon Brando, as the mad doctor-slash-dictator, makes a splashy entrance half an hour into the action, in Tiny …
Five Iowa grad students, of liberal persuasion, start up a tradition of inviting assorted reactionaries to Sunday dinner in order to poison them. A black comedy that struts its color as if it were fire-engine red. Stagy; stiffly directed (by Stacy Title); coarsely photographed. With Annabeth Gish (what a waste!), …
Eco-horror film -- or in the words of a heedless oil prospector, "some global-warming shit" -- about nature in revolt at the Arctic Circle. A slow first hour, but eventually a few decent special effects on a flagrantly frugal budget. With Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, and Kevin Corrigan; …
George Gallo’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film, extra-earnest, middling-maudlin, about a teenage old-fashioned representational landscape painter who nuzzles under the wing of a cantankerous old Russian impressionist, one summer in Pennsylvania in the mid-Seventies (that’s 1970s, not 1870s). It dishes out a lot of fundamental art talk, only once verging on the …
Cast against the blackness of night, a bleached, sandpapery-complexioned New World pirate known as The Admiral (Ron Perlman) pilots his ship across sand dune seas in pursuit of the subterranean creature his trackers have dubbed Diablos. Though budgeted at a mere $60 million, there was no scrimping on the special …
The moon landing was, among other things, possibly the greatest PR stunt America ever fashioned for itself. So even if it wasn’t a hoax executed by the late director Stanley Kubrick, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that someone had a Plan B in case things went FUBAR. To wit: …