The violent video game -- available in bloody and bloodless alternative versions -- played out by flesh-and-blood humans. It's not bloody, but nor, after all, is it at all fleshly: cartoony (or computer-graphicky) action; anything-goes sorcery; mystical moralistic mumbo-jumbo. With Robin Shou, Linden Ashby, Bridgette Wilson, and Christopher Lambert; directed …
Unabashedly cornball tribute to the inspirational educator, from the director of the unabashedly bonehead Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Stephen Herek. It's from the Disney folks as well, who have made the subject into something of a staple: Dead Poets Society, Renaissance Man, Dangerous Minds, not to mention the attached …
Prison film slash courtroom drama overhauled by a music-video aesthetic. The light is insufficient to conduct an attorney-client conference, let alone a public trial by jury. The intervening haze is sometimes indigo, sometimes marigold, most times mildew. The flashbacks are in bleached black-and-white. The independent-minded camera likes to shoot through …
American independent film made in Moscow by a British filmmaker. Writer-director Anthony Waller's feature debut is a having-your-cake-and-eating-it comedy-thriller, mocking the slasher-stalker genre and eagerly joining it. Strictly mechanical, strictly cynical, but with some clever variations on the creaky device of the literally dumb damsel in distress, and a lengthy, …
That's the way the title appears on screen, and that's the way the script proceeds throughout, with lots of instant redundant translation back and forth between two tongues. A larger problem with the script, but a mere symptom of still deeper problems with it, is the quantity of prose entrusted …
Slow, arty, pretentious vampire film, but hip and flip and facetious, too, a deadly blend. The lesbian menstrual midnight snack perhaps merits a footnote in studies of the genre. The restorative plasma from the blood of baby Mexican shark embryos surely does not. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white, with inexplicable shifts …
Claude Sautet, past seventy, herewith reaffirms his unflagging interest in people, and, more philosophically, in life and in love. Nelly, just separated from her couch-potato husband (is there a French expression, divan-pomme-de-terre?), accepts a position as the amaneunsis of M. Arnaud, a divorced and retired magistrate (a character who can …
Terence Davies's adaptation of the posthumous adolescent novel by John Kennedy Toole takes the filmmaker out of the autobiographical material and British working-class milieu of Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, and plops him down in post-Depression Dixie: a less personal film, but strenuously personalized. The imposition, …
Slow start while the well-established is re-established: the cuteness and adorability of Sandra Bullock ("I take my share of risks. I don't always floss. I rip the tags off my pillows"). That done, the incomprehensibility of computers is taken to be a license for any neck-wrenching plot turn or, more …
Just about the time the celibate, iceberg psychologist allows herself to be swept off her feet by a tattooed, motorcycling, ponytailed Puerto Rican, she starts to receive anonymous threats. The upshot: another black eye or two for the cinematic couch doctor. Ridiculous pose-striking sex scenes; ridiculous soft-focus photography, for that …
Essay in "real time": a common man selected from the crowd at Union Station to assassinate the Governor of California is given an hour and a quarter to carry out the assignment (while his daughter is held hostage), and that's how long the movie has yet to run. The real-time …
Seriously depressing documentary about the corruption of the flesh, among other things, as embodied in the commercial model, dilettante actress, rock singer, and drug addict, Nico (née Christa Päffgen), who peaked in the Sixties and died of a brain hemorrhage in 1986. Among the interviewees: the film director Nico Papatakis …
Hugh Grant runs through (and through) his stammering, eyelash-fluttering, forehead-crinkling "boyish" repertoire in the course of his girlfriend's unplanned pregnancy: "If you have a baby, that means he's gotta grow up." Another Hollywood plunder of a product of the French film industry, (re-)written and directed by Chris Columbus, that deep-sea …
Oliver Stone's scrapbook, lapsing at times into collage, on our thirty-seventh President -- assembled with characteristic hands-of-Stone clumsiness, and overloaded to the groaning point. (One by one the cherished anecdotes materialize: Nixon talking in the dead of night to the Presidential portraits; Nixon "rapping" with peaceniks bivouacked at the Lincoln …
Fanny Fink, of Germany, is in the same boat as over-thirty single women around the world: better chance of being hit by an A-bomb, in the local idiom, than of finding a man. Filmmaker Doris Dörrie's ravenous appetite for the quirky, the kinky, the kicky, nullifies not just the commonness …