Dark comedy of home security, emotional insecurity, double-dealing, paranoia. Heavy-handedly directed (by Evan Dunsky) and broadly acted by the male leads (David Arquette, Stanley Tucci). With Kate Capshaw and Mary McCormack.
An alternative-universe Hollywood where a married pair of superstars -- it will not be helpful to think of Cruise and Kidman, Burton and Taylor, Bogart and Bacall -- have appeared together in nine consecutive boffo blockbusters (the samples we see of their work are on a par with the standard …
Although snugly at home in the burgeoning genre of the food film (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, etc.), this is much more food for thought than food for tummy, an "issues" movie about the artist versus the businessman in the American marketplace. The metaphor for this takes the amusing …
The all-purpose title tells little about a slender, strenuous comic caper adapted from a novel by Dave Barry: a lengthy eighty-odd minutes. (Its release was postponed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, owing to worries over the black-market nuclear bomb smuggled aboard a jetliner: heh-heh.) The opportunities are spread …
Jon Amiel's doomsday thriller in the tradition of The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962) and Crack in the World (1965) stays serious long enough for a couple of catchy introductory scenes: thirty-two civilians simultaneously dropping dead within a few-block radius in Boston (the common thread appears to be their …
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? …
Not a title to mobilize the masses, although the proper name would seem to be widely and warmly regarded as audience-friendly: When Harry Met Sally, Dirty Harry, The Trouble with Harry, Harry and Tonto, Harry and Son, Harry and the Hendersons, etc., etc. One of Woody Allen's better efforts in …
Working-girl comedy in the vein of, oh, say, Working Girl, the eager, gifted, underemployed, and underpaid secretary ("A million girls would kill for that job") and the imperious, capricious, queen-bee boss. An ice queen, more descriptively, with snow-white hair, just a bit of sludge showing through at the neck, and …
Surprisingly bright teen comedy, littered with tidbits of literary and cinematic erudition, about a viral high-school rumor that transmutes a studious virgin into a “dirty skank,” a lesson in “the accelerated velocity of terminological inexactitude.” The path the story takes is not always judicious (the girl plays up her new …
While on a short layover in Paris, American writer James Lord agrees to be subject of Alberto Giacometti’s titular swan-sketch. What stars as a short stay plays out into an extended yawn. Stanley Tucci steps behind the camera and transforms his original screenplay into something akin to a Fathom Event …
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 …
In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …
In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …
Katniss Everdeen won her murder tournament in The Hunger Games. Now she has to deal with the aftermath. Once again, the best reason for seeing a Hunger Games movie is star Jennifer Lawrence, whose protean, Old Hollywood visage brings to mind the line about how They Had Faces Then. And …
Oh, so that’s what the Star Wars prequels were trying to do: trace the downward trajectory of a man from a good guy in a bad situation to a bad guy in a good situation — thanks in part to a healthy dose of heartbreaking loss. And director Francis Lawrence …