Stand-up comic Andrew Dice Clay takes on a different identity -- that of "rock-and-roll detective" Ford Fairlane, a Sam Spade in the body of an Elvis impersonator -- but he takes along his same Brooklyn braggadocio. This gives a revitalizing new slant to the generic rudeness and smart-assiness of the …
Existential pulp thriller from the canon of Jim Thompson, the sort of marginal but not negligible talent so useful in forming a cult, especially in a foreign country, especially France. The novels for the most part don't date well, and this adaptation by James Foley often seems anachronistically stilted. Jason …
Wild and crazy guys flying drugs (among other things) for the CIA in what the opening title specifies is "Laos, Southest Asia, 1969" -- so as not to be confused, presumably, with Laos, New Mexico. Plotting and characterization are no less overexplicit, even amidst a visual style that's like sweeping …
Eight re-creations of the Japanese director's unconscious dreams. All are so limpid, so economical, so tidy -- so much so as to cast doubts on the authenticity of their origins or the accuracy of their re-creations -- that the viewer is able to feel like Freud's brightest disciple. Death would …
Walter Hill's thirteenth feature is also — oh, unhappy day! — his first sequel. A sequel, moreover, to the most negligible and not coincidentally most lucrative of his previous movies. The verbal and sometimes manual patty-cake of Nick Nolte's slobby cop and Eddie Murphy's spiffy con — Rumbles and Screechy …
Just what the world needs: more bugs! Better bugs, besides: a lethal prehistoric spider from Venezuela, imported in a coffin and mated with the common American house spider. Frank Marshall, who had often enough served in the Producer role for Director Steven Spielberg, reverses the arrangement here, but has prudently …
Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical tale of a family of Russian immigrants in Baltimore spans something like fifty years -- sufficient in some people's minds to qualify any movie as an "epic" or "saga" -- but for the most part it spans only about five of them, from post-Second World War to …
A dose of humanistic treacle to do with the temporary revival of catatonic patients through the experimental administration (this is in 1969) of the wonder drug L-DOPA. ("Dr. Sayer!" "What is it?" "It's a fuckin' miracle!") The plural of the title is not solely because there is more than one …
Carlos Saura returns once more to the Spanish Civil War, this time in the company of Almodóvar's pet actress, Carmen Maura, perhaps in hopes of increasing his bookings abroad. Along with her, he adopts a more extrovert manner than comes naturally. And a more extrovert subject too: a vaudeville troupe …
Anyone who wasn't lost, in one sense or another, in Part II will have plenty more opportunity here: plenty more of that formula of obviousness and overstatement blended with in-jokes and incoherence. This time, science fiction collides with the Western (as our aging teenager travels to 1885 in his Nikes), …
With this one added on to Bedroom Window (added on to the screenplay of Silent Partner), Curtis Hanson has taken another long stride toward enthroning himself as the Patricia Highsmith of the cinema. Never mind "the new Alfred Hitchcock" and never mind the "innocent man" theme. What Highsmith knows well, …
Mushrooming complications in the nuptial plans of a nonreligious Italian-Jewish girl and her WASP fiancé. One of the complications -- the father of the bride's unwitting involvement with the Mafia -- is not only irrelevant to the wedding but bumps it down to the status of a subplot. (Anthony LaPaglia, …
Somebody down at Computer Casting Service must have been running a temperature when he matched Mel Gibson with Goldie Hawn (or when he matched each of them to their individual roles: Mel's a former hippie who still keeps the faith; Goldie's a former hippie who's now a corporate attorney). It …
Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath — and there is no sense here, as there is elsewhere, that he is having to go out of his way to cook …