Steven Seagal with a Brooklyn accent, even with English subtitles in a few Italian passages. With, also, for the first time, a director of some stature: John Flynn, to whom action fans are indebted for The Outfit, Rolling Thunder, others. Ethnicity by the shovelful; gritty photography (Ric Waite); a scary …
The directorial debut of actress Brigitte Roüan, who also has a role on screen in it; and of course a semi-autobiographical debut, as sure as she's French. A movie that calls attention to its structure, it tells the stories of three grown sisters in postwar colonial Algeria, taking up each …
Surfers mixed with cops and robbers, not in the sense of mingled with them, but in the sense of melded. Four surfing dudes bankroll their perennial pursuit of the Endless Summer by forming a holdup gang called the Ex-Presidents (rubber masks of Nixon, Reagan, Johnson, and Carter — and you …
Sort of an ecclesiastical King Ralph, in which an electric-guitar-playing country priest is erroneously elected Pope. Director Peter Richardson has the satisfaction of being cheeky about grave matters, but not of being funny about them. He has the added satisfaction, or the excuse, of being occasionally understated. With Robbie Coltrane, …
A feelie. Repressed South Carolina man is summoned to New York City to consult with his suicidal sister's psychiatrist; falls in love with the psychiatrist, teaches her snotty teenage son some football, teaches her snooty violinist husband some manners, learns something about himself, too, and returns to his family a …
Not (alas) an adaptation of the first-rate Dick Francis thriller of the same name, this Australian film tells of an extremely odd romantic triangle: a blind-from-birth photographer, the ristorante kitchen worker whom he recruits as a friend and helper (to describe his photos to him), and the blind man's improbably …
Peter Greenaway's fantasia on a theme of William Shakespeare puts forth a myriad of stage tricks and screen tricks -- smoke, lightning flashes, colored spotlights, inserts, overlaps, framing devices -- and a myriad of pudenda and penises besides. All in all, it makes the Elizabethan playwright look like the most …
Exuberant throwback to the Golden Age of "blaxploitation" (i.e., a literary adaptation from the series of Chester Himes detective novels that gave us Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970 and Come Back, Charleston Blue two years later), but with less attention to the detectives and more emphasis on "relationships": in …
Oppressed, divided women in 1920s China, as viewed through the placid, studied, carefully balanced, caressingly lit images of Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou). These are so intoxicatingly, swooningly pretty as to cast doubts on the strength of the director's convictions. Gong Li, as the Fourth Mistress in the house …
A tender, a loving, a careful treatment of Calder Willingham's novelettish novel about First Love and My Most Unforgettable Character (which comes to the same thing) in the Depression-period Deep South. It has some nice qualities. The standardized narration for the coming-of-age genre ("Lookin' at that house, a painful nostalgia …
Story of a switchboard operator by day and swinger by night who (as they say) finds Jesus. A kind of Looking for Mr. God, it fervently bears witness to the casually tossed-around truism that religion is a personal, not just a private and certainly not a collective, thing. But believers …
Mike Nichols on vacation from urbanity, sunning himself in Squaresville: "a long, tough rehabilitation" -- a road billboarded with triumph and insight -- after a high-powered Manhattan attorney stops two bullets in a convenience-store holdup. Getting an initial boost from a jiving, high-fiving black physical therapist, he has to start …
Kurosawa's Indian summer lingers on, a little drowsier than before. In truth, the best manifestation of his famous intransigence is his lack of compulsion to be scintillating, his lack of fear of being dull. Four undifferentiated schoolchildren on summer holiday (their T-shirts — USC Trojans, New York Mets, M.I.T. — …