Because it's a sequel, there is understandably less time set aside for awe-struck wonder and a lot more of getting down to business: namely, dinosaurs chomping and stomping on humans. Jeff Goldblum, who is granted almost godlike stature in his trompe l'oeil reintroduction on screen, pretty well synopsizes the scenario …
The so-young-so-in-love credits sequence, with a background saxophone to help it along, is fast left in the dust of a desultory road movie ("Just because I'm not going to marry you right now doesn't mean I don't love you"), with a hip selection of pop songs on the soundtrack (J.J. …
Campus frolic from Down Under and the Bargain Basement (hence, perhaps, the jaundiced image). Youthy tribulations probed with youthy glibness. The focus on the Cinema Department -- the "Doris Day As Feminist Warrior" thesis, the donut-munching professor's introductory lecture on Hitchcock-As-Auteur -- yields less fun than might be expected. With …
Say hello to Darious Lovehall (Larenz Tate) and Nina Mosley (Nia Long), two confused lovebirds who discover that you can never underestimate the power of a love jones. Lovehall is a young black poet in Chicago who starts dating Moseley, a beautiful and talented photographer. While trying to figure out …
Two weird sisters -- real sisters, really weird -- in hot competition for the dour deejay from Brisbane who has moved next door to them in a bleak little burg in the Outback. Some nice Bad Taste color and small-town tackiness, but the place is underpopulated and unexplored, and the …
A group of diverse gays, including a set of Jekyll-and-Hyde twins, convene throughout one summer -- Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day (Act One, Act Two, Act Three) -- in a remote lakeside house such as Chekhov might have coveted, to air their thoughts and feelings ("People are …
That would be a Des Moines video-store clerk who drops in unannounced on his London-dwelling brother on his own birthday. The brother, more to get rid of him during an important business dinner than to give him a proper birthday present, signs him up for a participatory role-playing game called …
The late Italian actor reminisces (a year or so before he was late) in front of the cameras of Giuseppe Rotunno, who had photographed him numerous times before. Nothing in the talk is too revealing or probing, everything's quite light and charming -- and the foreign-film buff will be gratified …
A movie to put a smile on your face, even if it can't keep it there: the gentle political comedy yields too graciously to the routine romantic comedy. Janeane Garofalo, a campaign worker for a Massachusetts Senator desperately behind in the polls, is dispatched to Ireland to trace the candidate's …
The fight for individuality, for vive-la-différence, waged on a far-fetched battlefield: a seven-year-old boy who is adamant that he was meant to be a girl. Cute kid (Georges Du Fresne); credible mom (Michele Laroque); splashes of color and imagination. Directed by Alain Berliner.
Rodney Dangerfield's career as a movie star ceased to exist after Back To School (1986). It's been twenty years, but if memory serves, Meet Wally Sparks is so bad it's depressing.
Kids' stuff by way of Marvel Comics. It has some amusing notions: that aliens from space are just another species of immigrant, gainfully employed all across the country in human shells (some of the more recognizable ones: Sylvester Stallone, Anthony Robbins, Dionne Warwick); that they are closely monitored by a …
By-the-book cop film: bonding between new partners of different races; a villain who speaks more by vibration than by voice; a fifteen-minute car-trolley-foot chase; a girlfriend in jeopardy (in bra); a straight-to-hell fireball at the finish. Eddie Murphy, Michael Rapaport, Michael Wincott; directed by Thomas Carter.
Director Clint Eastwood (not actor, too, this time) takes on John Berendt's "nonfiction novel" about a sensational homicide in Savannah, Ga., about the people of Savannah, about the history and the culture of Savannah, about Savannah in general. The early evidence of its reshaping for the screen is very encouraging: …