Shaky suspense film premised on a mousy accountant tumbling into an exclusive Manhattan sex club, anonymous one-nighters with uniformly beautiful career women: “It’s intimacy without intricacy.” Shakier as it goes. With Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Natasha Henstridge, and Charlotte Rampling; directed by Marcel Langenegger.
The Christmas spirit turns competitive -- keeping ahead of the Joneses, straight across the street -- and the competition is laughlessly lopsided. With Danny DeVito, Matthew Broderick, Kristin Davis, and Kristin Chenoweth; directed by John Whitesell.
A group of French-Canadian academics (History department) get together and talk sex, sex, sex -- all day and into the night. First it's the women by themselves at the workout gym, reminiscing about the sadist, the two blacks in Martinique, the Sicilian cop, the French tennis pro, the wife-swapping club, …
Penelope Spheeris's documentary on the punk-rock phenomenon in Los Angeles, or at least those aspects of it which can fit comfortably under her chosen title. "It's the only form of revolution left in the Eighties," philosophizes Robert Biggs, publisher of the punk organ, Slash. But on the evidence, it isn't …
The second sequel picks up not from the previous one in 1988, which dealt with the heavy-metal phenomenon, but rather reverts to the slightly passé punk-rock subject matter of the first documentary in 1981. Except that it deals less with the bands (though Final Conflict and Naked Aggression grab a …
Not a title to mobilize the masses, although the proper name would seem to be widely and warmly regarded as audience-friendly: When Harry Met Sally, Dirty Harry, The Trouble with Harry, Harry and Tonto, Harry and Son, Harry and the Hendersons, etc., etc. One of Woody Allen's better efforts in …
"Dedication," is a modern love story in which Henry Roth, a misanthropic, emotionally complex author of a hit children's book series, is forced to team with a beautiful illustrator after his best friend and creative collaborator passes away. Henry is messed up. A New York children's book author who tells …
"I can't afford to pass this up. It's an experience!" enthuses the sun-bleached jock to his fainthearted girlfriend, who only wishes to return home safely from her Bermuda holiday. The so-called experience is a Tom Swift-ian adventure involving sunken treasure, a giant moray eel, and voodoo villains. Its undeniable excitements …
The search for an Alzheimer's cure produces first a trio of experimental sharks of superior intelligence, speed, strength, cunning. And the floating laboratory of Aquatica becomes for the viewer a gruesome torture chamber (arms lopped off, bodies torn in half) and a real strain on the nerves. With Saffron Burrows, …
The search for an Alzheimer's cure produces first a trio of experimental sharks of superior intelligence, speed, strength, cunning. And the floating laboratory of Aquatica becomes for the viewer a gruesome torture chamber (arms lopped off, bodies torn in half) and a real strain on the nerves. With Saffron Burrows, …
Conventional crime story about a straight-arrow, clean-shaven, uniformed cop who gets bent, not broken, as a lightly bearded, Versace-attired undercover narc. It is filled with facile plotting and precipitous character development. It drips with glib cynicism about the Feds' commitment to the War On Drugs. It holds down the "emergent" …
Arturo Ripstein's remake of The Honeymoon Killers, a true story of multiple murder, has been flourishingly transplanted into a Mexican setting (genteel shabby interiors, barren parched landscapes) and thoroughly individualized. We still have the corpulent nurse -- a perfectly pear-shaped single mother to two small children, and a romantic fantasist …
The lady-in-distress storyline, unspooled on a smallness of scale that could nowadays be maintained only in an independent film, is agreeably old-fashioned, as you would expect when you know that it's a remake of a top-drawer 1949 melodrama by Max Ophuls, The Reckless Moment. The introduction of an explicit homosexual …
A swatch of TV-movie material given a big-screen sheen. Michelle Pfeiffer is cast as a Mother Discouraged whose three-year-old middle child disappears from the crowded lobby of the host hotel at her fifteen-year high-school reunion. Nine years later, after an unavailing nationwide search, a People Magazine cover story, and a …
Contemplation of the end of the world seems to be just about enough to compel seriousness from a Hollywood filmmaker. And certainly the bigger-than-Everest comet herein hurtling towards Earth compels more seriousness from Mimi Leder than the prospect of a mere nuclear detonation in the heart of Manhattan in her …