Fact-based story of an unemployed dockworker who finds two canvas bags stamped Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, freshly fallen off the armored truck and containing $1.2 million. Finding the money is no crime; keeping it is. But he never for an instant considers returning it. "Possession is nine-tenths of the …
Mental illness (manic-depressive type) as a sanction to act up a storm. Richard Gere, at his antsy-pantsiest, doesn't think he's ill; he thinks he's back in Breathless (James Brown on the soundtrack). And before the end he literally charms the pants off his psychiatrist, Dr. Elizabeth Bowen (why not Dr. …
Robin Williams, that thickset, hirsute Peter Pan, has hit upon another way not to grow up. He's an out-of-work actor and specialist in "voices" (Porky Pig, James Bond, Nicholson, Reagan, etc.), whose life-is-a-party antics finally get old with his wife of fourteen years, and who's booted out of the house. …
Gus, the Con-Ed guy, needs to find a new mate for his ex, so he can stop paying alimony, so he can go partners in a bowling alley. There's a nice long moment of discomfort when the two exes (Matt Dillon, Annabella Sciorra) bump into each other in the company …
Shakespeare, naturally, and nearly as naturally, Branagh. As always with Shakespeare, even without Branagh, there is a period of adjustment. The opening recital of the "Hey Nonny, Nonny" lyric, with the widely spaced and overarticulated words spelled out on screen in almost a follow-the-bouncing-ball fashion, is meant to make the …
Passably tantalizing despite the complete absence of believability, the ambiguity for ambiguity's sake, the academic existentialism, and the booksy dialogue. (Paul Auster wrote the actual book, co-adapted by first-time director Philip Haas -- first time at feature-length, anyhow -- and his wife and film editor, Belinda Haas.) Credit must go …
One doesn't expect a project nurtured within the Disney family -- the Touchstone branch -- to be fertile soil for themes of necrophilia and cannibalism. Nor does one expect to hear the adolescent heroine therein address the camera in such double-meaning terms as "Don't you want to eat me?" -- …
The unwanted gift of a bedside revolver sets off an oblique chain reaction: a feasible suspense plot treated in a cool, hip, suspense-snubbing way (the usual points scored against vulgar suburbia). An ambiguous performance by James LeGros as "a fishy guy" across the street keeps things interesting longer than otherwise …
For fans of Mike Leigh (High Hopes, Life Is Sweet), a bitter disappointment. It shows no letdown in his sense of character and environment: to wit, totally individualized and vivid caricatures, set off against a realistic backdrop -- an effect not unlike the cartooned Roger and Jessica Rabbit afoot in …
Small-caliber potshotting at the Lethal Weapon series, with the line of fire extended to The Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct too. The jokes never let up; they never get funny. With Emilio Estevez, Samuel Jackson, Kathy Ireland, Jon Lovitz, William Shatner, Tim Curry, and countless celebrity cameos; directed …
Typically threadbare Stephen King adaptation concerning a Mysterious Stranger -- the selfsame Mysterious Stranger who gave a name to a Mark Twain story, only several hundred years older -- who comes to the New England township of Castle Rock and sets the residents at each other's throats, proving the top-of-the-lungs …
Good cyborgs against bad cyborgs, with a half-cyborg cop caught in the middle -- and banged up, put out of commission, patched up again, with worrisome regularity. Lively (and lengthy) action scenes; a couple of moody interludes; and such uniformly bad acting, it amounts to a style. With Olivier Gruner, …
More accurately Henry Selick's Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas, Burton having had the idea for it and then having turned it over to Selick, a specialist in three-dimensional stop-motion animation. As so often in that medium, the aesthetic plane, quite distinct from the financial plane, is not sufficiently higher …
More accurately Henry Selick's Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas, Burton having had the idea for it and then having turned it over to Selick, a specialist in three-dimensional stop-motion animation. As so often in that medium, the aesthetic plane, quite distinct from the financial plane, is not sufficiently higher …