Bio of bull rider and youngest-ever inductee into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, Lane Frost. It's sincere; it's direct; it's, more than anything else, narrowly focussed: parents, a couple of buddies, a wife, that's it. The epilogue of documentary footage, home movies, and family-album photos persuades us that the …
A jump-ball for the soul of a high-school hoopster: bright prospects on one side, dark influences on the other. Stupefyingly unimaginative and amateurishly directed (Jeff Pollack), but Leon -- just Leon, no last name -- makes a good impression as the Strong Silent Type. With Duane Martin, Tupac Shakur, Marlon …
An odd comic concept: a retriever of missing animals (and a virtual Saint Francis to an illicit menagerie in his Miami apartment). The man himself, Jim Carrey, is still odder: a spastic, rictus-afflicted, ducktailed rejectee from a Grease audition, whose mouth (and sometimes even voice) resembles Dan Aykroyd doing Dick …
Priscilla's just a bus; Mitzi, Felicia, and Bernadette are her passengers, two female impersonators and a transsexual (the gaunt Hugo Weaving, the muscle-bound Guy Pearce, and the grande damish Terence Stamp), who take their cabaret act out of the cosmopolitan security of Sydney and into the backward Outback. There's a …
Wanna-be Dog Day Afternoon, only a (wanna-be) comedy, about a wanna-be rock band who take over an L.A. radio station with water guns, precipitating a standoff with police. (To maintain topicality, the cry of "Attica!" gets replaced by "Rodney King!") Good physical humor from Michael Richards; unrivalled by any other …
Fast-talking basketball scout travels to deepest Africa to recruit a blue-chip beanpole, gets involved in local politics, precipitates a basketball war, grows as a human being, triumphs as a sportsman, gets his man, gets promoted -- the feel-good prescription. With Kevin Bacon and Charles Gitonga Maina; directed by Paul Michael …
And on the pitcher's mound, and in the batter's box, and on the base paths, aiding the California Angels on their drive to the pennant. The (lower-case) angels, excluding the maniacally mugging Christopher Lloyd, are impressive -- glowing, shimmering, streaking things in the sky. But only the very young and …
One woman's story, more traditionalist than feminist, more concerned with responsibilities than freedoms. The director is the impeccably credentialed Martha Coolidge (Not a Pretty Picture, Rambling Rose), so that's all right, then. The story as such, although not lacking in particulars, is also not lacking in banalities: the brassy ethnicity …
If Home Alone, or more relevantly Home Alone 2, was a riot, wouldn't it be twice as riotous with a smaller fry? (And three stooges instead of two?) A big if. And the smaller fry — a crawler fry — adds mainly impossibility. Joe Mantegna, Lara Flynn Boyle, Joe Pantoliano; …
Beatle lore for the devotee, centered around the original fifth member of the band, Stuart Sutcliffe, whose first love was painting and whose head was easily turned by a pretty German photographer during a gig at a Hamburg strip club. The nondevotee will find the dramatic issues ("All he does …
Tall tale about a quartet of Honty Tonk Harlots, as the wanted posters describe them, on the run from Pinkerton detectives while simultaneously in pursuit of the outlaw gang that made off with their $12,000 nest egg. (In pursuit, more poetically, more American Dreamily, of a clean start at an …
Sledgehammer blows of feminist fury — from India, of all unlikely places. Dirty talk and bloody violence galore, in a "true story" spanning from 1968 — and one of the longest pre-credits sequences on record — to an up-to-date coda. For foreign-film buffs acquainted with Indian cinema chiefly through the …
Whit Stillman's idiosyncratic social comedy on a pair of sniffish, self-absorbed, fatuous young Americans abroad: male cousins, more exactly, in the sexually liberated, politically volatile Barcelona of the declining days of the Cold War. (Cousins, loosely speaking, of the preppies and debs of Stillman's first outing, Metropolitan.) It's no good …