A prideful hitman cannot forget or forgive the honey-tongued policeman, now Assistant D.A., who put him in prison. (He's a real bad one, all right: "The parole board's ready, Blake. I hope you remembered to floss." "I did!" he replies. "With your wife's pubic hair!") He doesn't just want to …
On the face of it, Kevin Costner as Robin Hood would seem to be as epical, as historical, as hysterical a case of miscasting as, say, Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus (King of Kings). He's soft. He's pudgy. His hair, longish, but with a nice clean edge on the Yuppie-style sideburns, …
A piece of retro science fiction, seemingly rooted up from an early-days issue of Amazing Stories, and set appropriately in the very period, or at the very end of the very period: 1938. You have for starters your straight-arrow hero, a daredevil aviator with never-combed hanks of hair framing his …
Rocking with dinosaurs! That was terrible. I'm sorry.
Compact chase thriller, with plenty of speed and stamina, about a clean kid in a dirty town. Pithy preamble, establishing the tandem motifs of Luck and The Law. Not much development, but thoroughgoing gymnastic explorations of a bowling alley, a shopping mall, and a dog track. The last of these …
Canadian songbird K.D. Lang (her acting debut, complete with nude scene) as an introverted Alaskan pipeline worker of indeterminate sex or sexual persuasion, who comes out, so to speak, for a fish-out-of-water German librarian (Rosel Zech). Being odd is so high a priority that the movie has no time to …
It's Nick and Deborah Fifer's sixteenth anniversary; it's Los Angeles; it's Christmastime, 1990. The documentary evidence of the time and place mounts up to a tidy pile: the blanket of smog in the Valley; the Beverly Center shopping complex; car phones; waistband beepers; psych-speak ("Your needs were not being met," …
Lily Tomlin's one-woman stage show transported to the movie house, and tricked up with shock-cut costume changes, split screens, double exposures, superimpositions, sound effects for pantomime, and suffocating or at least distracting background music. It's still not a movie, although Tomlin's impersonations can stand up to the closest of closeup …
Return of Michael Mak’s 1991 softcore Hong Kong sex fantasy, now in 3-D. The quest for erotic knowledge and bold new positions, if not Zen, involves Amy Yip, Kent Cheng, Lawrence Ng.
It's not a movie; it's a play, filmed before a live audience (which then can pitch in as a volunteer laugh-track) rather than adapted specially to the medium. It is not much of a play either, for that matter: one of those one-man shows that seem to impress people primarily …
The old amnesia gambit taken and run with. A man survives a car wreck looking like the alien in the same director's -- Wolfgang Petersen's -- Enemy Mine. Plastic surgery metamorphoses him into Tom Berenger, but he still suffers from what the doctor calls "psychogenic amnesia," less a medical condition …
Psychological thriller, with emphasis on the adjective. You get a great many extreme closeups, as though the camera wanted to bore into the brain through the eyeballs or crawl there through the nostrils (and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins give you plenty of surface activity, too), and you get a …
Historical speculation on the mysteries of who hid the ancient scrolls in the city of Dun-huang (only discovered at the start of the 20th Century), and why. The overriding question that arises in the midst of a dim narrative, overemphatic filmmaking technique, and cheesy musical accompaniment, is: Who cares? A …
A dirt-poor Texas independent film, and dirt-gritty in its blown-up 35mm print. Like another nearby independent film -- Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train -- it has an interesting structure not always (or often) matched by its details. Something like a La Ronde multiplied by ten or fifteen: the camera follows one …