The situation revolves around a New York rent-control apartment, sublet on a sort of time-share basis when the original occupant moves in with his fiancée. He (Kevin Anderson) wants to continue to use it for boys'-nights-out during his period of engagement. A lovelorn bachelor, gourmet cook, and neat-freak (Matthew Broderick, …
Van Damme as the archetypal Stranger in Town (all the way from Québec: hence his accent), an escaped convict who wanders onto the property of a husbandless/fatherless family currently getting squeezed by evil land developers. (Shane by the numbers, and without the husband/father to complicate matters.) The star possesses a …
“Minor work” is a generous classification for this, Studio Ghibli’s only made-for-TV offering, and one of the few Ghibli productions that animation guru Hayao Miyazaki didn’t have a hand in. Heckle & Jeckle had it right: “We cartoon characters can have a wonderful life. We can do anything we think …
The old story -- "inspired by actual events" -- about someone who goes away and someone who turns up some years later and who may or may not be the same someone who went away. (As in The Return of Martin Guerre, we can see with our own eyes that …
Sally Potter's "ruthless distillation" (her own words) of Virginia Woolf's imaginary biography slash historical novel slash literary criticism slash mash note on the poetic spirit in the Sackville family. (You'd never guess from the movie that it had anything to do with that.) At first it seems most concerned with …
In essence, Nancy Drew Goes to Law School. (And Solves the Murders of Two Supreme Court Justices, Where the FBI, the CIA, and the DCPD Have Failed.) (Or as the heroine herself puts it: "The hubris of the young, huh?") (Or as the White House Chief of Staff puts it, …
Clint Eastwood, in his job as director, sets out a group of well-defined, well-differentiated, well-distanced characters who are each enclosed by their individual circumstances, influences, choices. Two escaped convicts, who don't much like each other, and are soon reduced to just one, take as hostage the seven-year-old son of a …
For an encore to his Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme offers an olive branch to the homosexual protesters of his depiction therein of a serial killer. His atonement takes the form of a courtroom drama about the wrongful-termination suit of an AIDS-afflicted yuppie lawyer and closet gay: a talking-heads …
Jane Campion (Sweetie, An Angel at My Table) continues to pursue an interest in the tricky cinematic subject of inward states: namely those of a mute-by-choice Victorian Scotswoman and the white-man-gone-native (Maori facial tattoos, Maori bedmates) with whom she has an extramarital affair in far-off New Zealand. At some point …
A memory film that begins with a young med student returning after a nine-year absence to "a place that no longer exists" (immediate air of mystery), the place, more specifically, of his coming-of-age, the place in the Argentine hinterlands to which his Peronist parents had retreated after a term of …
Billed as "a street romance," but really more of a road romance. The romancers themselves are from the "street" -- South Central L.A. -- but the romance blooms on the road, during a mail run up the Coast Highway to Oakland, with two illicit female passengers aboard the postal truck. …
Yet another conversion from French to English, francs to dollars. Insofar as Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita (now she's la femme Nina: after Nina Simone, her favorite chanteuse) was already immersed in the Hollywood mind-set, little revision was needed. And little improvement is noted (quite the opposite at the end). …
Remedial history lesson on the Afro-American West ("People forget," says the authoritative Woody Strode in a present-day preamble, "that one out of every three cowboys was black"). But the story proper -- tracing the path of a "posse of outlaws," one white man and the rest black, from the front …
Bone-rattling football action (slo-mo, of course), interrupted by passing thoughts on "character," education, substance abuse, teamwork -- nothing too strenuous. James Caan, Craig Sheffer, Omar Epps, Halle Berry, Kristy Swanson; directed by David S. Ward.