A Blackboard Jungle, a To Sir, with Love, for the Nineties. Which means something nearer a music video than a bona fide movie, driven by a persistent rackety background beat, and speeded through five-minute class periods forever interrupted by the clangorous bell at peaks of tension and unsettlement. The innate …
A highly competitive movie, at least insofar as its subject matter. That it deals with the World Chess Championship ensures it a degree of the dramatic tension inherent in any sports event, and that the competitors are an aging, ailing Soviet Jew and a temperamental, somewhat paranoid Soviet defector ensures …
Character sketch, in fussy fine-point, of the town nutball, a repressed, ridiculed, Coke-bottle-lens-wearing, Fig-Newton-loving spinster. A psychological "label" is expressly withheld, but with Debra Winger doing her up large, she's more a performance than a person, a trick-bag of tics and quirks, an oddity for public exhibition. With Gabriel Byrne, …
Annual family gathering (parlor games, touch football, talent show), complicated by romantic rivalry: two brothers, a widower with three girls and a reformed womanizer, both smitten by a worldly Frenchwoman. A showcase for Steve Carell's self-consciousness, somewhat more sympathetic than Dane Cook's luggishness. Juliette Binoche looks as if she could …
This privileged peek inside the Paris Opera Ballet — more than a peek, a thorough probe — ought to be catnip to anyone interested in classical and modern dance, or for that matter in artistic creation in any form, the process of bringing execution in line with conception. Veteran documentarian …
Formula disaster film, with only the tiniest ingredient of human interest and (like Independence Day, like Daylight) an overriding dash of canine interest. Because the agent of disaster is a volcano ("She's just clearing her throat. She hasn't even started to sing yet"), there is considerable delay before the big …
Andrzej Wajda's French-Polish co-production is quite a triumph of mise-en-scène. There is quite a lot to triumph over, too. The history lesson chewed over here has that dutiful and drudgy quality of a freshman fixture on the college curriculum, with none of the imaginative liberties taken in, say, La Nuit …
Unassuming, unassertive little feminist comedy about a Mexico City phone operator (by day) and competitive ballroom dancer (by night) whose Platonic dance partner of six years vanishes without a word. She goes hunting for him in Veracruz, finds new friends and a romantic fling instead. Maria Rojo is a winning …
For this Irish fantasy from the Disney studio, they've shown the good sense to hire John Ford's cameraman (on The Quiet Man, among others), Winton Hoch; but they've asked him to shoot hardly anything more picturesque than the grizzled mug and decaying lower teeth of Albert Sharpe. The movie is …
Pretty flimsy even for a comic book. The gotta-have-a-gimmick superhero has been blinded in a childhood run-in with some biohazardous substance (in a quarter-hour prologue), and his handicap causes him to develop his remaining senses to the point where he can swing around the skyscrapers like Spider-Man, dodge projectiles of …
One thing to be said for a Wes Anderson film, and it's no small thing, is that it bears an individual stamp. A stamp as flat as a postage stamp, as emphatic as a rubber stamp. (Whap, whap.) A well-known commodity after Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life …
Inflammatory cop drama set against a backdrop of the well-documented racism in the LAPD. It begins, indelicately enough, with the infamous Rodney King tape, and the bulk of the action takes place while awaiting the verdict in the Simi Valley trial of the arresting officers. (The conclusion of the action …
Dark, without a doubt, and dank, and steamy, and simultaneously futuristic and antiquated, and currently in the grip of pasty aliens who can reshape reality at will. (At the will of the scriptwriters, that is, not at their own.) An impressive production to a certain degree; an oppressive one to …
Tolkien-esque fantasy, designed by British illustrator Brian Froud, co-directed by Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets) and Frank Oz (voice of Miss Piggy, Yoda, et al.), and enacted by a new breed of puppet for which there is as yet no convenient label. The major designing effort has gone toward …
Tolkien-esque fantasy, designed by British illustrator Brian Froud, co-directed by Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets) and Frank Oz (voice of Miss Piggy, Yoda, et al.), and enacted by a new breed of puppet for which there is as yet no convenient label. The major designing effort has gone toward …