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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Time-travel brain-twister credited as "inspired [but not very] by the film La Jetée -- the 1962 experimental short composed exclusively of still shots, save one. There are some provocative or at least irksome notions in the script by David and Janet Peoples (Mr. and Mrs.), chief among them the implicit …
Hollywood continues to pay reparations for Gone With the Wind with this elegiac adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s autobiographical saga of a free black man forced into bondage for a dozen years. They might just as well have named it The Passion of the Slave. Chiwetel Ejiofor suffers well under the …
Maestro of movie mayhem Michael Bay (Transformers) turns his camera on the real-life violence of Benghazi 2012 and despairs, giving us the story of a badass American (John Krasinski, sad-eyed and bushy-bearded) who nevertheless finds himself worried, in between firefights and rightly so, that his kids will remember him as …
The title specifies the distance over which an NYPD detective must transport a garrulous witness from jail to courthouse in Lower Manhattan, weaving through a whole platoon of murderously corrupt cops; and the hour-and-a-half duration approximates the time limit allotted to get him there. Overextended even at that tidy length, …
Grandfather and grandson swap personalities, and reverse the digits in their ages, after plowing the Rolls into a storefront. The old man's body remains laid up at the hospital, while his soul does handsprings inside a college freshman: this arrangement allows George Burns to fire off some interior-monologue wisecracks without …
Bernardo Bertolucci combines a pamphleteer's penchant for straight, party-line ideology and a best-selling novelist's flair for wanton sensation: heaps of flesh, blood, and excrement (of both the literal and figurative sort). In its breadth, if not in its detail, this maxi-budgeted extravaganza could loosely be termed "novelistic." But just whose …
It’s being touted as his 100th starring role, but Jackie Chan’s heroics take a backseat to Winston Chao’s endless speech-making in this commemorative retelling of the birth of the Republic of China. Unless you have more than a working knowledge of the subject, this could conceivably be the longest two …