Moderately old-fashioned but modishly souped-up, grandiose, operatic, and overscaled account of a real-life disaster at sea ("a disaster of epic proportions," in the forecast of a TV weatherman), the swallowing of the Andrea Gail swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., during the "Storm of the Century" of 1991. James Horner, …
Mildly disappointing, coming as it does from the writer-director of The Arrival, an efficient little s-f thriller in the body-snatcher mode. David Twohy has here an idea even more modest and rudimentary: spaceship crash-lands on planet of monsters. But the monsters crave the dark and shun the light, and the …
It seems a safe bet that Ed Harris would not have been interested in directing himself in the role of the leading light of American Action Painting (notwithstanding his uncanny resemblance to him from the eyebrows up) unless the painter were also a violent alcoholic who could be counted upon …
Popi pushes his three sons -- the Fighting Ortegas -- to go further in the boxing ring than he himself went. Dramatically and stylistically crude and clunky -- barely TV-movie level -- though Jon Seda has a nice quiet manner as the eldest son. With Jimmy Smits, Maria Del Mar, …
American hostage in the clutches of fallen Marxist money-grubbing guerrillas in the mythical Latin American nation of Tecala. It all might have been more bearable if only the hostage's wife were someone other than Meg Ryan. With her swollen, flattened, pink-painted lips, her Gorgonian hairdo of braided snakes, her flirtatiously …
A middle-brow mulling of the issues of free expression and censorship, with the Marquis de Sade as the bone of contention. (Present-day application warmly invited.) The movie does not try to deny literature's potential damage to weak minds -- at least to the extent that a slobbering resident of the …
Oppressive vision of life in a Glasgow slum during a garbage strike in the Seventies, and particularly the life of a twelve-year-old boy with head lice and a bad conscience. Made bearable (barely) by the intermittent good eye of first-time filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, and by a brief fantasy of a …
After some rubber-knife stabs at human interest, techno-babble, and metaphysics, this space opera settles down to the nuts-and-bolts business of the first manned mission to Mars, in preparation for the wholesale evacuation of Earth in the mid-21st Century. An advance seeding of the planet with oxygen-generating algae has failed to …
Caper thriller about a hapless ex-convict who passes himself off as his knifed cellmate to his cellmate's voluptuous pen pal, and in the result gets caught up in a Christmas Eve casino heist. It offers the somewhat unnatural and unsettling spectacle of an old dog trying to learn new tricks. …
Boaz Yakin's big sellout. The independent director of Fresh and A Price above Rubies yokes himself to producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, etc.), for a Disneyfied "inspirational" sports film about the black football coach at a desegregated high school in an all-white conference in Virginia in 1971. (The …
Slob-appeal (and scab-appeal) football comedy, suggesting not only that a team of nobodies could be rounded up in a week when the regulars go on strike in mid-season, but also that the part-time barnacle-scraper who bombed out in the Sugar Bowl four years earlier, and who hasn't strapped on a …
A grim-and-grimmer urban horror story, from a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., about four drug dependents en route (in a final flurry of cross-cutting) to neatly synchronized rack and ruin. The downward spiral of your dime-a-dozen junkie needs more than new extremes of physical disgustingness -- the gangrene, the two-way …
The lifeless widower of a heart donor happens to meet and fall for the recipient, a waitress in an Italian-Irish restaurant in metropolitan Chicago. (Various reactions: "What was God thinking!?" "Wow!" "Mama mia!") Very nuzzly, very namby-pamby, very Lifetime Channel, very forced and flat. With David Duchovny, Minnie Driver, Carroll …
The peak of Shanghai Triad in the directing career of Zhang Yimou looks from here a long ways off in the distance. Zhang Ziyi, the doll-faced fighting machine of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, plays an unlettered Chinese peasant who, in the olden days of arranged marriages (1958), sets her cap …
Animated feature from DreamWorks (with a brief Jaws tribute as a nod to Big Chief Spielberg). Kevin Kline sounds like Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh sounds like Kenneth Branagh (i.e., very British), Rosie Perez sounds like a thorn in Spanish Harlem, and the songs by Elton John and Tim Rice ("Look …