Not just a movie title, but an honorific conferred by Playgirl magazine on its readership's annual favorite centerfold. For the year 1992, that was Dirk Shafer, thus officially inducted into the army of male sex symbols who in their private lives prefer males themselves. A pregnant topic for a movie, …
Tim Burton's sniggering hommage to grade-B science fiction. Hordes of computer-animated Little Green Men with big heads and exposed brains, reminiscent of the aliens in This Island Earth, annihilate the majority of the big-name cast (including Jack Nicholson in two roles, Glenn Close, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Danny DeVito, …
Sticky seriocomedy, from a second-rate stage play by Scott McPherson, concerning the reunion of two middle-aged sisters after one of them is diagnosed with leukemia: all of the characters are at least half-cracked; most of them more than half. Meryl Streep, as a chain-smoking cosmetologist and single mom, is typically …
It's too late. Too late, that is, to overturn conclusively the long-held belief that no variation on the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, no matter how twisted and remote (Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, The Nutty Professor, even Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype), could ever fail entirely to resonate. Jekyll and Hyde ... …
Grim fairy tale, from the pen of Roald Dahl, about a moppet blessed with a love of reading (particularly the works of "Darles Chickens"), a prodigious intellect, telekinetic powers, while cursed with sleazoid parents and a sadistic school principal ("Use the rod, beat the child. That's my motto"). For director …
Van Damme as twins again (remember Double Impact?), but mainly as a morose French cop who doesn't meet his mirror image until the latter is under a sheet, and who then sets out to get to "know" his brother and simultaneously to find his killers (Russian mobsters, rogue FBI men). …
That would be the Archangel Michael, if you please. The one who battled Lucifer ("That was a long time ago"). The one who invented, so he claims, the concept of standing in line. The beer-bellied, crotch-scratching one who smokes cigarettes but nonetheless smells "like cookies." The one who now, losing …
The semblance, the illusion, the mere shell of an historical-biographical-hagiographic epic, in a revolutionary vein that stretches, and twists, from Braveheart through Gandhi through Spartacus (just missing Che en route) through Viva Zapata through Juarez and through Abel Gance's Napoleon. A project, we have been assured, dear to the Celtic …
Former French biologists and current French documentarists Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, in impossibly bright clear sharp photography, have here attempted to do for the insect world what their compatriot Jacques Cousteau once did for the marine one. (In science-fictional form, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and, to a lesser …
A let's-put-on-a-show comedy of broad winks at the audience and pistonlike elbows in the ribs -- written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, though acted, with the sole exception of Joan Collins as a talent agent, by a cast of no-names. The show in this case is Hamlet, misguidedly scheduled for …
Streisand the star has so enslaved Streisand the director that she -- the latter -- is no longer free to make the movie that cries out faintly to be made. That movie perhaps already did get made, in France, in the late Fifties, by André Cayatte, under the same name …
Uncomplicated but unlucid spy trickery, nominally based on the late-Sixties-into-early-Seventies TV show. The star-hyphen-producer, Tom Cruise, has transformed the teamwork concept, however, into more of a ball-hog concept. Even more tightly wound than usual -- with, after all, the fate of the free world on his shoulders -- Cruise has …
Grimly unimaginative feminist odyssey through the stations of orphan, servant, prostitute, artist's model, artist's wife, artist's widow, mother, and (in a manner of speaking) mother of an orphan, before a final arrival at a poorly camouflaged Happily Ever After -- all under the benediction of an Eng. Lit. "classic," with …
A sunny, smiling, photogenic Gypsy boy afoot on the French Riviera. Tony Gatlif, the maker of Latcho Drom, applies a solid documentary technique (no, not in the tradition of Mondo Cane, Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Freudo: Mondo is the boy's name), a roving impressionistic eye for a place and its inhabitants. …
Bertrand Blier, aging provocateur, makes a match between a streetwalker and a street person, promptly promoted to pimp. The male-fantasy clichés of the former (heart of gold; loves her work; occasional freebies) are just the beginning of the escalating absurdities. At the end, Blier, through the mouth of his ungrateful …