An Errol Morris documentary on an execution expert. Even before you get past the opening credits -- crackling electric arcs accompanied by quasi-Wagnerian heroic music -- the irony weighs on you like iron. And the rapidly deployed stylistic devices carried over from Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control -- the …
Sunny light comedy, but not without shadows. The central character of a small-town psychologist -- both the character and the town are named Mumford -- will naturally have easy access to the murky corners of life. And the neat twist whereby the psychologist himself proves to be a benign imposter …
Gagged-up resurrection of the ancient Egyptian monster, mated here with Indiana Jones, renamed Rick O'Connell. (He announces his mission like so: "Rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, save the world.") So contemptuous of their material are the filmmakers, they felt compelled to spend a jillion dollars on …
Gagged-up resurrection of the ancient Egyptian monster, mated here with Indiana Jones, renamed Rick O'Connell. (He announces his mission like so: "Rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, save the world.") So contemptuous of their material are the filmmakers, they felt compelled to spend a jillion dollars on …
Gagged-up resurrection of the ancient Egyptian monster, mated here with Indiana Jones, renamed Rick O'Connell. (He announces his mission like so: "Rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, save the world.") So contemptuous of their material are the filmmakers, they felt compelled to spend a jillion dollars on …
Albert Brooks's sixth directing effort is his first outright disappointment. It doesn't start out that way. The protagonist -- Brooks himself, of course, this time in the part of a mainstream screenwriter -- is close enough to Brooks in reality, a middle-aged Hollywood marginal who has "lost his edge" and …
A change of pace for horrormeister Wes Craven, although the title (God knows) is pretty horrible. Originally it was to be 50 Violins: much better even before you know the significance. These instruments, purchased cheap on a family sojourn in Greece, are the personal possessions of one Roberta Guaspari, and …
Slight, discursive, quaintly amusing period piece, based on a memoir by Denis Forman, about the incomplete education of a prepubescent Scottish lad in the Twenties, and about his difficulty in matching his learning to the life around him. He picks up plenty of fascinating information, for instance, from the forbidden …
But it's the son's father, the moderate, who is the central character: an adaptive Indian cabbie in northern England, who has an ill-tempered wife ("What's wrong with Louie Armstrong?" he wants to know. Her response: "It's too trumpety") and a hidebound fundamentalist son, and who finds his only solace in …
A frozen small town's Saturday-afternoon tradition of an intramural hockey game gets written up in Sports Illustrated by a bumptious one-time resident of the place: "On pure skating ability, the boys of Mystery, Alaska rival any team in the NHL." No sooner said than the New York Rangers are booked …
Fractured superhero fantasy about a team of gotta-have-a-gimmick wannabes (a shovel, forks, flatulence, fury, a bowling ball as weapons), some of whom are demonstrably more super than others. The mood of wise-ass whimsy does not really create a fertile climate, and the visual clutter doesn't help. But the amiable cast, …
The youngest copy editor at the Chicago Sun-Times gets her big break as an undercover reporter on an up-to-date exposé of high school. Problem is, this mousy virgin, needlecrafter, and turtle-owner was a teenage geek, and immediately falls in now with the "wrong crowd" -- an extracurricular calculus club called …
Arturo Ripstein's treatment of a static short novel -- a frozen portrait -- by Gabriel García Márquez, the chief features of which are an impecunious old revolutionist awaiting an army pension that will never come, his asthmatic wife, and their sole material asset, a gamecock inherited from their slain son. …
China's Zhang Yimou scales down -- down from Shanghai Triad, way down from To Live, down even below The Story of Qiu Ju, with which this film shares something in common, namely a comically resolute heroine: an ill-equipped thirteen-year-old substitute teacher who treks from a mountain village to the big …
A reunion of the star and the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis respectively, both very skillful in their differently frothy and frilly ways. But now Julia Roberts crashes the party, in a self-referential role ("It's taken two rather painful operations to get me …