With a new director (Christopher Nolan) and a new star (Christian Bale), the fifth entry in the Batman series, true to its title, returns to square one: how and why Bruce Wayne came to be Batman; the psychological root of his fixation on flying mammals; the part this played in …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …
As hard to accept as a blind swordsman may have been in feudal Japan (the Zatoichi series), it is many times harder among the guns and cars and machinery of modern-day America. The flashbacks to Vietnam and the relationship with an orphaned towhead don't make it go down any easier. …
Furiously winking Jazz Age comedy, in the Damon Runyon idiom. That means the characters will have names like Regret, Feet, The Brain, Lovey Lou, Hortense Hathaway, and Handsome Jack. (Ouch! Ow! Oof!) The job of keeping up the pace and the tone, shirked by the writing and editing, falls chiefly …
Post-Rollerball, post-MAD MAX, post-apocalypse science fiction about a sport of the future called The Game, played by athletes called juggers, with a dog's skull for a "ball." Very minimal, except in the amounts of makeup. (These juggers are more beat-up than any professional hockey player.) With Rutger Hauer and the …
What Bill and Ted did for time travel (i.e., less than nothing), Buffy does for vampire hunting. An airheaded high-school cheerleader, whose yellow-and-purple costume is neutralized by jaundiced cinematography, is the Chosen One to combat an infestation of bloodsuckers in Southern California. Mostly flat outside of Kristy Swanson's chest and …
An adaptation of the "unauthorized autobiography" of Chuck Barris, TV game-show producer -- The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, et al. -- and moonlighting CIA hit man. Says him. We meet the protagonist (played with maximum smarm and supreme sleaze by Sam Rockwell) holed up, Manson-haired, naked, close to catatonic, …
Yes, but more of blood, plus some bubonic-plague lesions and vomit for good measure. This is Europe in 1501, and a California sex kitten (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has been abducted from her Australian betrothed (Tom Burlinson) by a handsome Dutchman (Rutger Hauer) and his yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum band of mercenaries. The stuff …
Extremely unpleasant suspense film. C. Thomas Howell, drowsy at the wheel of a Chicago-to-San-Diego drive-away, pulls over and picks up a rain-soaked hitchhiker, Rutger Hauer (pretty unpleasant right there, you might think, but there's more). The passenger's conversation, occasionally punctuated by switchblade, consists of stuff like: "You wanna know what …
A great film based on a masterpiece. Polish director Lech Majewski uses Pieter Bruegel’s grand The Procession to Calvary in Vienna to open up its world. At the same time, the actors and vignettes seem to fold into the painting, achieving a hybrid beauty and late-medieval power. Not much talk, …
A contrast is started to be set up between the methods needed to combat New York street crime and methods needed to combat political terrorism, but this is never carried through to any illuminating degree. You could easily lose some of your respect for Wolfgar, the lone-wolf terrorist, when his …
"In this world you have entered," remarks the CIA dirty trickster, "things are rarely as they seem." Indeed, sometimes in this world you have entered -- this world of Robert Ludlum spy fiction -- things are so far from what they seem that when they are revealed for what they …
Paul Verhoeven's memorial to the Dutch resistance movement in World War II — a big, sloppy, tasteless blockbuster. The director's special predilection for the physically disgusting is apparent as early as the freshman-hazing scene which opens the action, or at least as early as the moment in that scene when …