Another quietly offbeat project for actor-turned-director Keith Gordon (The Chocolate War, A Midnight Clear), a somber and somnolent treatment of the irony-laden Vonnegut novel about an American spy in wartime Germany, to outward appearances employed, where he can do more harm than good, as a Nazi radio propagandist who nightly …
Cornell Woolrich's dog-eared mistaken-identity thriller (filmed twice before as No Man of Her Own and, in France, I Married a Shadow) has here been converted into a mistaken-identity comedy. The plot -- a pregnant woman in a train wreck trades places with another pregnant woman killed in the wreck; the …
The very engaging stand-up comic and sitcom star Ellen DeGeneres takes her very individual sense of timing and emphasis, her essential down-to-earthiness and her flutters of lighter-than-airiness, to the big screen. (Not counting her bits in the documentary Wisecracks.) The material is little more than an extended date-from-hell routine, and …
Back in the good old days of carte blanche police brutality: L.A. in the early Fifties, in the company of the four felt-hatted musketeers -- the hard-punching untouchables -- of Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn. (The New Zealand director, Lee Tamahori, proven poet of bar fights and …
Light but weighty comedy-fantasy whose fruit-salady color conceals crunchy, protein-rich nutmeats. The premise is founded on something recognizably real: the shortage of time in the average day. The next step, really quite a leap, is mere expedience. Our harried construction executive pitches a fit in front of an altruistic geneticist …
A reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale in which the Muppets take to the high seas in search of buried treasure. Young Jim Hawkins is given a treasure map by a mysterious sailor and sets sail with his friends the Great Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat. Among the crew …
Cicely (Jake-ann Jones) has just landed her first major role, but there's a big problem: it requires a nude scene. Her mother was a Blaxploitation star known for her sex appeal, while Cicely is a survivor of sexual assault with life-long body image issues, all of which has left her …
French filmmaker Claire Denis (Chocolat) immerses us deeply into the lives of her characters, principally two motherless children, sister and older brother, a pregnant teenage runaway and a lonely pizza cook who lusts in his fantasies after a comely neighborhood baker. The deep immersion is quite literal, by way of …
The remake of the 1963 Jerry Lewis comedy is not the most extreme, but perhaps the most literal illustration of the prevailing bigger-is-better philosophy. More exactly, fatter-is-better. Rather than depend on the rigors of performance, Eddie Murphy depends instead on a ton of foam-rubber latex as well as on a …
Volker Schlondorff's eccentric WWII film, adapted from a 1970 novel of Michel Tournier's, about a French misfit who finds adventure, happiness, and a sense of purpose as an obliging prisoner of the Nazis. It makes an interesting companion not only to Schlondorff's The Tin Drum, but to Lacombe, Lucien and …
Grateful acknowledgment and homage to a past generation of black Americans, ca. 1946-62, in rural Mississippi. (Based on the memoir by Clifton Taulbert.) Emotionally constrained, even rather flat and flavorless. And the directorial debut of actor Tim Reid is a lot of heart and not much eye. Good jobs by …
The blossoming romance of two single parents who must juggle his or her job crisis and his or her only child (sometimes both children at the same time) over the course of one rainy day, one busy day, one hectic day, one frantic day, one long day. (One of them …
Two bad-ass dudes a generation past their prime, co-founders of the Rebels street gang in their salad days, return to their hometown of Gary, Ind., to kick the butts of their murderous successors. The slowness and thickness of Fred Williamson and Jim Brown underline the element of wishful fantasy -- …
David Schwimmer makes the jump from the little screen's Friends, and backwards to the big screen's The Graduate: a Hoffman-esque figure drawn into a romantic triangle with an older woman and a same-aged woman; boyish and puppyish; helpless and needy; innocent and adorable. Or that's the hope, anyhow. The story …