A comedy of male menopause. The hero, a Hollywood songwriter with personalized license plates that read "ASCAP," is explicitly a product of an earlier, more romantic era, and is quite nakedly a stand-in for writer-director Blake Edwards. Edwards's conscientious efforts to adopt liberal, open-minded, up-to-date attitudes lead him onto some …
Prehistoric Low Camp. The archetypal Hero’s Journey, at its earliest starting point: the outcast of a mountain clan, who appear to wear bird droppings on their faces, wending his way past woolly mammoths, giant man-eating gobblers, a saber-toothed tiger, across the Sea of Sand to the Head of the Snake …
Wanting to win the heart of Stella, an aspiring but frustrated rock star, a stuttering college student tries to finish 100 poems dedicated to her.
Proof that the intellectually challenged are fun to watch even with subtitles. Commence with a dead cat, an overly-latexed actor buried beneath more wrinkles than a kennel filled with shar-peis, and a neck-breaking 20x1 zoom. It only gets clumsier. At his current age, our titular centenarian (Robert Gustafsson) flees a …
The drawing is a little meager compared to the finest work of the Disney animators; also is afflicted with a bad case of the cutes. But the storyline picks up conspicuously when it moves beyond a couple of frightfully bourgeois dalmatians and introduces several different breeds of dog, as well …
Awkward and long-winded translation of the 1961 Disney animated feature (and anti-furrier fable) into live-action. The dogs are adorable, even eloquent, but hardly as obedient as their cartoon forebears; and Glenn Close's dognapping offenses seem mild next to her overacting. With Jeff Daniels and Joely Richardson; directed by Stephen Herek.
Comedy of sexual confusion, revolving around an Icelandic couch potato who has a New Year's Eve fling with his mother's lesbian lover ("I never cheated on my mother before"). That partner, a Spanish flamenco dancer, turns up pregnant at the same time as the potato's unwanted girlfriend. Tart, earthy, thick-skinned, …
Plus assorted other breeds, plus one loquacious parrot, plus a rehabilitated (not for long) Cruella De Vil ("Please, call me Ella"). A higgledy-piggledy incoherent mess, busy enough and loud enough to distract the little ones, and dismay the bigger. Glenn Close, Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Evans, Gerard Depardieu; directed by Kevin …
Just serviceable bunker thriller that asks the question, “Would you want to survive The Big One if it meant being stuck in a windowless concrete cottage with the kind of guy who spent his life preparing to survive The Big One?” (Heck, his own wife and daughter couldn’t stand the …
A lot of time is spent, and a lot of blood spilt, to set up a situation so simple-minded that we will approve of Charles Bronson throwing out the legal code: "I remember when legal meant lawful," he philosophizes. "Now it means some kind of loophole." Unlike the high-strung sex …
The graduating class of Lake Howell High meets for its ten-year reunion. The student body appears to have been created in a petri dish: Hitler couldn't have engineered a more physically unblemished graduating class. In addition to the Tatums (Channing and Jenna Dewan), there's Ari Graynor, Justin Long, Max Minghella, …
Doomsday documentary on the imminent destruction of Planet Earth if earthlings don't change their ways. As laid out by a big panel of deep thinkers, the what's-gone-wrong part of the film (roughly two-thirds of it) is pretty depressing; the what-can-be-done part (the remaining third) is not commensurately encouraging. Narrated in …
Russian revision of Twelve Angry Men, slightly “opened up” to no benefit (the makeshift jury room is a gymnasium), still stagy, wordy, overacted, mired in lengthy monologues, spun out in excess of two and a half hours. With Sergey Makovetsky, Sergey Garmash, Sergey Gazarov, Valentin Gaft, Alexey Petrenko, Yuri Stoyanov, …