James Joyce's longish short story (from "Dubliners"), brought to the screen posthumously by John Huston. This is the stagiest and stuffiest brand of literary adaptation, the kind of thing you expect to see on PBS by way of the BBC, made by someone looking for a short cut to profundity. …
Kenneth Branagh's second directorial effort makes his first one, Henry V, look downright modest. Any filmmaker (it bears repeating) will require no more taste or knowledge than the average high-school sophomore to think to impress somebody by aligning himself with Shakespeare. To attempt additionally to replicate the three-hatted juggling act …
Cheapo zombie comedy from New Zealand, in vigorously, aggressively bad taste. (That was the proud title of director Peter Jackson's first film: Bad Taste.) There are several laughs (the kung-fu clergyman: "I kick ass for the Lord!"), but nothing to compete with the quantities of blood, pus, severed limbs, entrails, …
Horror shocker with numerous actual shocks, from the maker of Raw Meat: Gary Sherman. While offering no narrative invention on the level of the earlier movie, this one nonetheless takes full advantage of the horror genre's -- and specifically the zombie subgenre's -- easy access to the subject of death. …
The trail of a cop killer leads from L.A. via Oklahoma to a White Supremacist enclave in Colorado. The sketchy policework is padded out and burdened down with moral righteousness about the mission itself and Wambaugh-esque bathos about the hero (divorce, drinking, overdue bills). Some odd bits of casting: William …
An old-fashioned damsel-in-distress story, scarcely surprising considering it's literally an old damsel-in-distress story. The novel on which it is based was finished in 1963 by Charles Williams, one of a legion of American thriller writers -- the Edgar Allan Poe Brigade -- better appreciated in other parts of the globe …
Writer and director Karen Moncrieff, of Blue Car, goes at the title figure -- not just dead, but brutally murdered -- by way of five separate storylines, one after another, some more tangential than others, all populated by horridly stunted humans. Structurally intriguing, but grindingly grim and condescending. With Toni …
Cops and zombies, with a sense of humor that's supposed to be black but is really only dim. Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo are the plainclothes partners on the case, well paired for lantern jaws, though Williams can't match Piscopo's muscles, which the latter has obviously been working hard on …
Evil is afoot in Andrew Wyeth farm country, where a sect of isolationist religious fanatics identified as "Hittites" (they, we are told, "make the Amish look like swingers") keep guard against the influence of the "incubus," and turn a cold shoulder to the brazen Hollywood starlets who occupy the farms …
A free-willed automaton named Beebee, muttering and sputtering like a cousin to Popeye and Donald Duck, gets blown to bits by a reclusive old shotgun-toting hag -- a turn of events comparable to the deaths of Janet Leigh in Psycho and John Wayne in The Cowboys. But the teenage whiz …
Not even the thirstiest of Western fans could work up much enthusiasm over the news that Jim Jarmusch, of all people, had made one. And the emerging manhunt for a greenhorn named William Blake (Johnny Depp in wire-rim specs, plaid suit, bow tie) produces nothing to accelerate the heartbeat: the …
A debate-forum movie, a chew-over of the topic of capital punishment, complete with de rigueur attention to the moment-by-moment minutiae of death-day prison procedure (frequent shots of the clock on the wall along the way). As seemingly dissimilar as it is from writer-director Tim Robbins's first effort -- the political …
The basic idea -- namely, to interweave clips from actual 1940s films noirs into a parody of that genre, so that the star, Steve Martin, would appear to interact with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Fred MacMurray, Alan Ladd, et al. -- sounds at first blush as if it must …
Moldily old-fashioned melodrama involving a Lady in Distress, a dead ringer for her, another dead ringer for her, an Old Dark House, a snowstorm, syringes and spiked beverages, a secret passage -- the works. Arthur Penn's heart can't have been in it, but his craft is -- and in abundance. …
A charismatic English teacher at a repressive prep school in the Fifties inspires his pupils to reconvene the long-defunct Dead Poets Society, a secret literary round-table "dedicated to sucking the marrow out of life" and to worshipping at the altar of Whitman, Byron, Keats -- the more romantic (blustery, sugary), …