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, ...
James Franco’s impish appeal as outdoorsman Aron Ralston is caught between a hard place and two rocks: the stone that pins down his right arm in a Utah canyon and the clobbering boulder of director Danny Boyle’s “art.” Complicating the simple story are flashbacks, visions, jokes, music, and the hero’s ...