A film of famous post-production troubles, so watered down in the editing (or somewhere) that you can no longer tell what the hard stuff originally was. Scotch? Bourbon? Rye? Whatever it was, it tastes now like nothing kickier than oversugared and overiced tea: something to do with two style-conscious voluptuaries …
Light-hearted, ham-handed caper film about a bounty hunter, a con artist, some diamonds, and a lottery ticket. Too brutal to be seen as funny, too shticky to be taken straight. With Ice Cube and Mike Epps; directed by Kevin Bray.
Elementary (primitive, primeval) creature feature centered around a documentary film crew searching the Amazon for the People of the Mist, but first finding their reverenced reptile instead, thanks largely to a half-crazed, fully leering snake hunter (Jon Voight, having a ball) who is more hijacker than guide. The creature itself, …
Comedy yields to homily in the face of avaricious developers. A socially conscious snore. With Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer; directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan.
Ice Cube & Co. update Barbershop for a kinder, gentler world. There's ladies working in the shop now!
Peace entreaty for a gang-ridden L.A. ghetto, made by twenty-three-year-old writer-director John Singleton -- his first feature. Very simple and direct in style (to match the intentions), and almost unformed as a narrative. Larry Fishburne is imposing, though limited, as a Positive Role Model, and the movie feels more comfortable, …
The homosexual Austro-Hungarian intelligence officer of John Osborne's play, A Patriot for Me, is portrayed predominantly in shades of frigid blue, as if the action were viewed inside an ice cube. This may be someone's notion of "distancing." The movie takes too long to get to the interesting stuff -- …
Ice Cube, a Bay Area teacher, returns to his roots in South Africa, only to land in a rubbish pile of carjackers, racist thugs, dope peddlers. Elizabeth Hurley, the Estée Lauder girl, turns up as a crackhead stripper: "I like dahncing." Neither has much of a grasp of the job …
2032 A.D. The repressive utopia of San Angeles (merger of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego) is disrupted when a 20th-century criminal called Simon Phoenix (the name is bad enough; the yellow hair is worse) escapes from cryo-prison. The cop who put him there, and who has inhabited an ice …
A pair of backed-up-against-the-wall black Baltimoreans (Ice Cube, Tracy Morgan) go into a ghetto church with the intent to rob it, enter into endless negotiations at gunpoint with the fundraising committee, fix the air-conditioning, and come out better, and not poorer, men. A caper comedy devoid of laughs. With Chi …
Charlie Day is a nice-guy teacher (with a sweet kid and a pregnant wife) in a high school that demands educators who look like Ice Cube and talk with his brand of menace and authority. But even Mr. Cube is not immune to the degradations of Senior Prank Day, and …
Space opera by John Carpenter -- a tatty patchwork of his previous films, most prominently Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, The Thing (a line of the script even quotes the title of the original short story, "Who Goes There?"), Prince of Darkness, and Vampires. It has a choppy plotline …
Two idealistic outcasts in the County Sheriff's Office, the first black deputy and the first female deputy (the cherub-faced Michael Boatman and the pixie-haired Lori Petty), pool forces to unmask police corruption, racism, sexism, the whole ball of wax. The churning, slow-going exposition works its way into a pretty jittery …
The American college campus (fictitious Columbus U., after Christopher, not the city in Ohio) as microcosmic melting pot. Or better, boiling pot, with little actual melting taking place. Racial and ethnic separatism; feminism; neo-Nazism; competitive athletics; dormitory stereo wars; date rape; sexual disorientation; etc. Those who were overhasty about exalting …
The personal assistant (Dakota Johnson, relaxed and confident) to a megastar headliner (Tracee Ellis Ross, peerless-ish) at the crossroads of Vegas residency and cutting a live greatest hits album tries branching out by guiding the career of a promising singer (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Considering the error margin potential inherent in …