Computer-cartoon sea monsters slurp up most of the cookie-cutter humans aboard a pleasure ship in the Western Pacific. (Commonly asked questions: "What the hell is/was that?" and "Now what?") Gore galore; fun none. With Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Kevin J. O'Connor, Wes Studi, Djimon Hounsou; written and directed by Stephen …
Serviceable low-budget sci-fi about a long-throated sea creature riled up by an ocean-floor research team. We don't get to see much of the monster -- though he causes no end of shipboard mechanical difficulties -- and when we do see him he always seems to be saying "ah-h-h." With Greg …
Michael Cimino's Vietnam War story centers around an "ours not to reason why" trio of mindlessly patriotic Middle Americans from a small Pennsylvania steel town. Three hours long, in the tradition of bigness established by the Second World War stories of Norman Mailer, James Jones, Herman Wouk, and Irwin Shaw, …
Albert Brooks's fourth directing job, his first in six years, with no apparent boost or wheel-greasing from his Oscar-nominated part in Broadcast News, and with no loss in modesty, either -- or integrity -- or funniness. The modest idea this time has to do with the tribunal that awaits every …
Murder investigation, overly contrived yet overly obvious -- a bad combination. Some intense pieces of acting, especially by Mary Beth Hurt as an immaculately manicured neat-freak and by Sheree North as a teenage porno actress's anguished mother, insufficiently comforted by Jesus. Less especially by Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard, that …
A sex scandal that topples a British M.P. of Leftish persuasion seems to be connected somehow to the death in mysterious circumstances of a black Borstal boy. Just how and where these are connected is a matter of some interest and suspense -- most intensely in the mechanical but well-oiled …
Workmanlike account of the untold (or anyhow unfilmed) true story of a 20th-century Moses and his two brothers, who sheltered hundreds of Jews from the Nazis in the forests of Belorussia, such dark days that color itself evidently went into hiding, leaving behind only a greeny or occasionally orangey residue. …
A little girl’s first Sex Education class raises questions in her mind about where she came from, and raises the word “penis” repeatedly to her lips. The answers take the form of a “mystery love story” in which her father recounts in flashback his entanglement with the three leading ladies …
As tedious, as self-indulgent, as inert, as exasperating as the typical Henry Jaglom talkathon may be, at least we can feel the filmmaker is in his element. Here he is hopelessly over his head with the forces of destiny, the occult, eternal love. The repetitive semi-improvisatory delivery of lines, the …
Requires you to park your reason, along with your car, outside the theater. A ferry boat blows up in post-Katrina New Orleans, killing 543, mainly returning Navy men and their welcoming families; and the uncounted body of a young woman bearing residue from the explosion has been fished out of …
From the filmmaking team of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, a vision of a cannibalistic future in a rust-colored Paris. The futurity opens the door to plenty of oddities besides the cannibalism and the monochrome. In fact nothing that's not odd gets in. (A flooded cellar crawling with snails and …
Rather too dreamily photographed; but this little parable about four Atlanta businessmen out of their element on a canoe trip in uncivilized hillbilly country is very intensely acted, especially by Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty in very tricky roles. Manliness is the issue at nearly every turn, and the varying …
Documentarist Amy Berg puts a human face on the pedophiliac priest: the extremely creepy one of Father Oliver O'Grady (familiarly, "Father Ollie"), a serial abuser, of both sexes, in several parishes in Northern California in the Seventies and Eighties (youngest victim: nine months). His willingness to talk about the case, …