The comic-book fantasy during the filming of which Brandon (son of Bruce) Lee was shot to death with a prop pistol. We have been assured that the fatal accident has been left out of the final cut, but that doesn't eliminate the ghoulishness of the thing. It's an essential element …
This revival of Arthur Miller's witch-hunt allegory, set in 17th-century Salem but really about McCarthyism, comes along far too late to retain a scrap of its original courage. It has a hard enough time retaining a scrap of seriousness. The all-girl gang of devil-raisers, scurrying and screeching with carefully rehearsed …
Itty-bitty independent film attempts to stir up some Twin Peaks-ian malignancy around an unbalanced Kansas housewife, an unfaithful husband, an enigmatic grease monkey, and a menacing bar owner. Nothing much comes of it, beyond some nice footage of an approaching thunderstorm at night. With Jennifer Taylor, Aaron Shields, Bob Peterson; …
Dangerous Liaisons retailored to the bodies and needs of modern American teens: it's still weighted with quaint notions of purity and reputation, but played mainly for catty laughs. (Don't misunderstand. It's not about teenagers who consciously act out a video they've seen, much less an 18th-century novel they've read. They …
A talkie. And not much else. The nonstop talker is one Timothy "Speed" Levitch, free spirit, political subversive, raving lunatic, and part-time tour guide on a Gray Line double-decker in Manhattan, reeling out a tangle of verbiage ("I was re-emerged into my own naiveté") in a Porky Pig voice. He's …
William Friedkin's footnote to his Boys in the Band, a cursory look at the heavy-leather and S/M corner of the homosexual world. This dark and unexplored nook is chosen apparently only for its voyeuristic appeal, and is observed from the point of view of a middle-class gaper. The better title …
Terry Zwigoff's documentary on underground cartoonist R. (for Robert) Crumb is an interesting movie, but not really very interesting as a movie. Zwigoff's chief gift as a filmmaker -- an entitlement as distinct from a talent, a thing handed him on a silver platter -- is that of access. A …
Teenage Fatal Attraction. The crushee is the yuppie journalist (Pique Magazine) in the guest house out back. The crusher is a spoiled Lolita (fourteen, nearly fifteen), roller-blader, sunbather, classical pianist, literary stylist, champion equestrian, entomologist, all-around Wunderkind, and fledgling frame-up artist. Sillier and sillier. With Cary Elwes, Alicia Silverstone, Jennifer …
True story based on two books by Donald Woods, a former newspaper editor in South Africa. Woods himself is the main character, and as an "uninformed" liberal he makes a useful point of identification for much of the world's white population, specifically director Richard Attenborough and his same screenwriter from …
The initial situation is distressingly static and stagy. A team of IRA terrorists in Northern Ireland have abducted an occupational English soldier (Forest Whitaker, with uncertain accent), one of whose captors (Stephen Rea), while awaiting a prisoner-swap deadline, gets to know the man intimately, even lending a helping hand when …
An excuse for Meryl Streep to do an Australian accent, and it goes without saying that she does it uncommonly well, better, that is, than the common Australian. "Oy thank it's toyme we statted air holly-dyes," etc., etc. Of course there is also a story around all this, a true …
A film -- the first film -- from the democratic South Africa. And as such, a rather tardy adaptation of the Alan Paton novel, particularly when held up against Zoltan Korda's 1951 version. It recounts, in between outright sermons, the "bitter journey" of a rural black clergyman to Johannesburg, where …
Or cry uncle. A clique of prep-school brats, in raw, grainy, glary photography, perpetrate a serial-killer hoax that seems to be coming true. A mindless mind game designed to ensnarl, even ensnarling the designers. With Julian Morris, Lindy Booth, Jared Padalecki, and Jon Bon Jovi; directed by Jeff Wadlow.
Satirical science fiction, alternative-universe subdivision: What would have happened had the South won the Civil War? (One thing: it would have become known as the War of Northern Aggression.) A viable idea, but throttled by ham-fisted humor, amateur acting, and a cheap and expedient mockumentary format, mixing archive footage, staged …