The real story, the background story, the astounding story, would tell of how a young Mexican director, with but a single art-house credit to his name, came to America to make a movie, made a completely commercial and conventional scare show, and held onto his integrity in the bargain. The …
Assembly-line vehicle for the mile-a-minute mouth of Chris Tucker, a penny-ante hustler entangled with diamond smugglers, gun runners, loan sharks, a pregnant girlfriend, and a TV newshound. Cold, impersonal, indifferent, but Tucker has his moments. With Charlie Sheen, Heather Locklear, Paul Sorvino; directed by Brett Ratner.
High-tech lynching fantasy. Sure, Keenen Ivory Wayans was poised to fire a bullet of ice into an industrialist targeted by his covert-ops unit, the Black Sheep. But it wasn't him who shot the First Lady instead. Now everyone in the vicinity is on his tail -- the LAPD, the FBI, …
Arduous art film from Russian director Alexander Sokurov, focussing on a dying mother and doting son, in a depopulated pastoral dreamscape, photographed in a peculiar through-a-whisky-glass-darkly style, with smoky diluted color and funhouse-mirror distortions, backgrounded by soothing "environmental" sound effects: rumbling thunder, gurgling water, cheeping birds, chirping crickets. All very …
Live-action cartoon, with a realistic-looking rodent thwarting the restoration of a Victorian architectural treasure. The slapstick violence is overscaled in the mode of the day, and the depersonalized pest is completely disagreeable ("He's Hitler with a tail"). Nathan Lane and Lee Evans, the talented twosome who take most of the …
Undramatic historical drama focussed myopically on the increasing influence of an impertinent Highlander over the widowed Queen Victoria. Stand-up comic Billy Connolly acquits himself well, but the capable Judi Dench starts out about fifteen years too old for the role, and the rest of the cast are cardboard. Directed by …
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to be exact. (Not 4:00 p.m.) The White House. Victim a woman in mid-twenties, with indications of recent sexual activity. The scandal-hungry plot works overtime, but only mechanically, to generate suspects and suspense. The best fun is watching Diane Lane -- the Secret Service liaison to the …
The Australian director of Muriel's Wedding, P.J. Hogan, goes to Hollywood, and his jaunty approach to color, to fashion, to pop music (in Muriel's..., it was the Greatest Hits of ABBA; in My Best Friend's..., it's predominantly the canon of Burt Bacharach and Hal David), has survived the journey intact. …
Freshman-level Ingmar Bergman: obvious observations on the stranglehold of family, on the occasion of a Thanksgiving gathering. And it doesn't, as Bergman didn't, shy away from the earthy side of life, either: a symphony of creaking beds after lights-out. (For laughs, a solo sleeper presses a pillow over his face.) …
Sidney Lumet in his accustomed role as message carrier and conscience nag. He is always at his least subtle when, as here, he trusts himself to author his own screenplay (Prince of the City, Q&A;), to say nothing of the supplementary, seven-paragraph Director's Statement in the press notes: "Why am …
Very vérité portrait of drinking, drugging proles in modern London, photographed by a seemingly drunken or drugged cameraman. Gary Oldman's semi-autobiographical directing debut persuades us of the bleakness of these lives by the uneconomical method of boring us stiff. Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Charlie Creed-Miles, Edna Dore.
A long day of "the troubles" -- a lot of them -- in Belfast, 1975, plus a days-later graveyard epilogue. Well acted by all involved, but emotionally bludgeoning. With Ian Hart, James Frain, John Lynch, Jenny Courtney; directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan.
An ever-the-twain-shall-meet comedy -- black and white, poor and rich, foe and finally friend -- whose few deft touches are swiftly engulfed. Writer and director Steve Oedekerk steals his own show -- not so hard to do -- in a brief on-screen appearance as a night watchman with an overactive …
Dark Smith (James Duval) is a gorgeous, alienated 18-year-old obsessed with the End of the World and finding his one true and lasting love. The object of his affection, Mel (Rachel True), feels for him deeply but can't commit herself to any one person or gender, splitting her time between …
The title applies as well to the ruthless downsizer, or corporate hitwoman, at Constant Consumer magazine as to the "freaky little mouse" whose demotion sets her off on a literal killing spree, with a fast-growing collection of bodies in the basement. The directorial debut of still photographer Cindy Sherman, whose …