Grueling and gruesome British-made horror film about six women friends (plenty for sacrifice), out for adventure, who enter an uncharted Appalachian cavern ("If there's no risk, what's the point?") and encounter a subterranean tribe of omnivores. Director Neil Marshall, straight-faced, businesslike, unpretentious, had a real movie going -- a movie …
Grueling and gruesome British-made horror film about six women friends (plenty for sacrifice), out for adventure, who enter an uncharted Appalachian cavern ("If there's no risk, what's the point?") and encounter a subterranean tribe of omnivores. Director Neil Marshall, straight-faced, businesslike, unpretentious, had a real movie going -- a movie …
Absurdist comedy as flat as its setting, a godforsaken Southwest town (pop. 87) put under quarantine when an overturned tanker spills the "secret ingredient" of Empire Cola across the road. The literal high point is the World's Largest Ice Cream Cone, the town's tourist attraction. With Brendan Sexton III, Kate …
A sort of lesbian rallying call, based on a novel by Jane Rule. The physical setting is quite good, although the best of it -- a Nevada dude ranch for recuperating divorcées, Western shirts with fancy piping, and so on -- was better in The Women; and the 1950s time-setting …
Noel Coward's play, adapted by Ben Hecht, about a bohemian ménage à trois in a Paris garret. We've been told it was naughty in its day. We have to take this, if at all, on faith. Ernst Lubitsch directs it with a certain style -- his certain style -- but …
Robert Rodriguez's big-budget Hollywood followup to his teensy-tiny El Mariachi: a faked folk tale, with a bubbling-over level of mirth, to do with an angelic avenger (the preening, posturing Antonio Banderas) who lugs around a private arsenal inside a guitar case. In spite of the newfound gloss, it still seems …
The Joseph Hayes stage thriller about the middle-class home invaded by three murderous thugs. Except the happy home of William Wyler's version (1955) is now the broken home of Michael Cimino's, with a consequent loss of emotional focus. It's Anthony Hopkins's tortured, philandering man of the family vs. Mickey Rourke's …
John Waters, facing the unenviable task of topping previous heights of grossness, suffers from the what-do-you-do-for-an-encore problem. It is hard to dish out shocks when the cult audience is expecting them, craving them, clamoring for them. Nothing is as shocking, in this generally slipshod fairytale about a kingdom of crooks, …
We are asked to swallow several horse-pills of improbability. A yuppie Madame Bovary (Rosanna Arquette), who reads the Personals the way an earlier generation read novels, and who has identified herself with a recurrent character named Susan (pop singer Madonna), receives a bump on the head and wakes up thinking …
Another tasteful collaboration of director Barbet Schroeder and his faithful photographer Luciano Tovoli, working chiefly in cool blues and battleship grays, with a subtle spreading of shadows. The taste ends there. The project -- the only known bone-marrow match for a policeman's leukemic son is an incarcerated psychopath -- is …
A genuine curiosity co-written and co-directed by New Zealanders Stewart Main and Peter Wells, a Victorian-period bodice-ripper about a romantic hexagram (i.e., overlapping triangles), spectacularly camped up with operatic acting, baroque camerawork, Expressionistic color (liberal splashes of cardinal red in particular), and artificial studio sets. It has something of the …
Computer cartoon available, but not imperative, in 3-D. Admittedly the Universal logo, our planet on a blanket of stars, looks good in 3-D, and the closing credits have some fun with the extra dimension, trying with the aid of an outthrusting steel tape measure to see how far off the …
A terrible title, although as such an accurate forecast of the movie in its entirety: arch, pretentious, mystical-magical malarkey ("You are seriously underestimating the power of the forces aligned against us") in which an escaped convict chases his lost loot and his lost lady around the city where, as we …
A tidy little small-scale low-budget thriller on an apocalyptic theme (same as Fail-Safe, same as Crimson Tide), a bout of nuclear brinkmanship -- or "Showdown in the Desert," as the cable news channel instantaneously christens it -- between the new leader of Iraq (Saddam's son) and the first Jewish U.S. …