The bad old days of the Berlin Wall and the Big Brother tactics of the GDR secret police, the Stasi. The case in point: a Party pooh-bah has the hots for a celebrated stage actress and, to clear the way, orders some dirt dug up on her playwright boyfriend, an …
Albert Brooks, director, writer, star, returns to top form, and for the first time since his first film, Real Life, literally portrays "himself," though one would hope not altogether accurately. The idea of the film is self-evidently an inspired one. The U.S. State Department, hoping to win the hearts and …
We are dealing with a bona fide case of mistaken identity here. No, we are dealing with a bogus case of fakeout -- a crime story with an apparent innocent (Josh Hartnett) caught in the machinations of two rival gangs, African-American and Jewish, or "Darkies" and "Skullcaps" in copspeak, headed …
A cable-channel comedian (Robin Williams, given plenty of scope for his penile obsession) runs for President on a dare, and thereafter needs to be continually nagged by his aides to be "edgier" and "funnier." These might also be the voices inside the head of writer and director Barry Levinson, who …
Sofia Coppola, possibly drunk on power after the reception of Lost in Translation, has gained in ambition as an artist without really gaining in confidence as a technician. She has all the costumes her heart could desire, and all the access to Versailles, but her color palette is a bit …
Writer-director Randall Miller incorporates sizable chunks of footage from his 1990 short of the same name, in the form of flashbacks to 1962, recollected by John Goodman in the present day as he lies dying in the back of an ambulance, victim of a car wreck en route to a …
A reasonable facsimile of a screwball comedy, certifiable as harmless beyond the target audience of tween girls, to do with two pampered heiresses -- real-life sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff, equally charming, energetic, pretty, and, to the naked eye, wholesome -- who must toughen up when their cosmetics empire trembles …
The name of the Eighties television series -- fighting crime and looking cool doing it -- has been appropriated for the same reason that the social striver might don Armani. The drug sting in the film could have been pulled off by anybody, not exclusively Sonny and Rico and Co. …
The throbbing Lalo Schifrin theme music from the original late-Sixties TV show is still the best thing about this third mission, as it was about the first two. It's hard to decide what's the worst thing. Tom Cruise would be a too-easy fall guy. Granted, he seems to be getting …
First directing job for Chris Noonan in the eleven years since Babe, an innocuous biopic on the author and illustrator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, not to mention proto-feminist and proto-environmentalist, who braved the disparagement of gray-souled publishers ("Bunnies in jackets with brass buttons? However do you imagine such …
Computer-animated kiddie horror show lowers its sights to an illusion of Claymation. The human figures are awfully stiff, but the space around them is wonderfully plastic and elastic (the fall of an autumn leaf, first thing in the movie, gives you a dizzying idea of what's in store), and the …
Totally unvivacious gay comedy about Mr. Picky looking for Mr. Perfect. Not only shot digitally, but projected in theaters that way, as if further to encourage the moviegoer to wait for the DVD. Or eternity. With Daniel Letterle, Diego Serrano, David Monahan, and Meredith Baxter; directed by George Bamber.
Boy meets girl superhero. Boy dumps supergirl. Boy incurs superfury. A high-concept low comedy, with coarse photography and cheesy special effects. Luke Wilson, Uma Thurman, Anna Faris, Rainn Wilson, Eddie Izzard; directed by Ivan Reitman.
Nothing if not esoteric: a backhanded salute to Mexican wrestling movies -- campy superhero adventures of masked luchadores with names like Santo and Blue Demon -- and, more broadly, the whole south-of-the-border wrestling subculture. Odd, offbeat, outlandish as it is, it makes a fitting, albeit unforeseeable, followup to Napoleon Dynamite …
A Mary Poppins for the Tim Burton era. Magical powers, for sure, but also a bulbous nose, a bucktooth, a unibrow, and two hairy moles, all of which disappear one by one as she imparts her Five Lessons to the "very clever but very, very, very naughty" seven children of …