Modernized biography of songwriter Cole Porter, digging up all the bisexuality that Night and Day in 1946 could not go near. Despite the theatrical device of reviewing his life as a musical show emceed by the Grim Reaper, it remains a rather banal backstage story, lacking much in the way …
Current events copied and rewritten (and painstakingly explained for those not in the know: "Israel is America's best friend in the Middle East," the command post informs its field officer. "And it's only twenty minutes from Beirut."). There is even less creativity in the rewriting, if possible, than in the …
The amiable and pitiable Chuck Norris surrounded as usual by bumblers and incompetents. Chief among them his director and brother, Aaron. With Billy Drago and John P. Ryan.
2032 A.D. The repressive utopia of San Angeles (merger of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego) is disrupted when a 20th-century criminal called Simon Phoenix (the name is bad enough; the yellow hair is worse) escapes from cryo-prison. The cop who put him there, and who has inhabited an ice …
Silly willies: your basic Night of the Living Dead-type siege, under the aegis of Satan, but also that of TV's Tales from the Crypt, complete with jocular prologue and epilogue hosted by the Crypt Keeper. Gore galore, and bare breasts of great size if not frequency. All very adolescent. With …
Corporate espionage in the slimy world of cybersex. Writer-director Olivier Assayas sidles up to the skulduggery in casual fashion, dallies among the ambiguities and amoralities, never really hits his stride. The Danish-born Connie Nielsen (who has made movies in France before) and the American Chloë Sevigny speak impeccable French, and …
Science-fiction satire about a computer that possesses an organic brain, Robert Vaughn's voice, a male chauvinist attitude, and a consuming desire for Julie Christie to bear him a flesh-and-blood heir. Donald Cammell, writer and co-director of Performance, handles this foolishness with little sense of fun, except perhaps in his creation …
Hal Salwen's high-concept, low-budget comedy about a circle of friends, or friends of friends, too busy ("besieged," "deluged") to get together face to face. It's close to encyclopedic on telephone culture (answering machines, call waiting, conference calls, faxes, cel phones, phone sex), and it's a cinematic challenge: no two characters …
Demoted from prototype to copycat, the classic comic strip comes to the screen in the dust of Problem Child and (thanks to a robber on the prowl) Home Alone. The small-town setting, however, apart from the automobiles, seems to belong to an earlier day: no skateboard? no Nintendo? Director Nick …
Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
Japan’s Oscar-winner for foreign film is without apology in the sentimental mode, a classification now out of fashion if never (secretly) out of favor. Directed by the veteran Yojiro Takita, it tells of a laid-off cellist, self-admittedly second-rate, who returns from Tokyo to his hometown and answers an ambiguously worded …
A Chicago family man with a diabetic daughter strikes up a risky flirtation with a woman on the commuter train, ultimately takes her to an out-of-the-way fleabag, but before any passion can be consummated they are beset by a sneering robber, beaten and raped respectively, and subsequently blackmailed. Nasty, twisty, …
American documentary on French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida: at home, at conferences, in classrooms, in interviews. With all the unavoidable distractions of the image, the film is less useful as a means of appreciating Derrida's thought than of appreciating his photogenic handsomeness: corona of white hair, nut-brown skin, a lived-in face, …
Alongside Akira Kurosawa's customarily virile athletic work, this slow, contemplative movie is apt to be seen all the more clearly as an old man's movie, a movie made with a reduced pulse rate and a tenacious, almost desperate attempt to savor every passing moment. At bottom, it is a My …