A girls' rock band (plus one guy, a classical pianist, to replace the girl keyboardist) makes the big jump to L.A. It's no Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: no one gets shot in the esophagus, no one gets his head chopped off. One of them does take too many …
A Spike Lee comedy (or "a Spike Lee joint," as he would have it) about life at a black Southern college: fraternities, football, student protests, everything. Certainly a step in some direction from She's Gotta Have It, with a bigger budget, full color, and a "major Hollywood studio" behind it. …
Dickens's Christmas Carol recast as a comic vehicle for Bill Murray: about the most depressing evidence yet available for the fate of the sentimental vein in fiction, with tons of "production values" to supply the crushing coup de grâce. Such is the depth of Murray's insincerity -- his remoteness from …
Not, as the title may have led you to suppose, an ingenious blend of two novels by D.H. Lawrence. Rather, the "rainbow" and "serpent" turn out to be Haitian for "good" and "evil," and there are other such ethnological nuggets buried here, too. (The movie is based -- like that …
The almost mythic grandeur that Carl Schultz gave to the old-fashioned soap opera of Careful, He Might Hear You would seem, even at the exact same dimensions, rather dwarfed amid the escalating hysteria of this, his first American film. Dead fish by the thousands have washed ashore in Haiti. Ice …
The entire N.Y.P.D. appears to be on the take, but any incipient paranoia gets worked off in sweaty, hard-breathing, thoroughly preposterous action scenes. Peter Weller and Sam Elliott, as a dogged Legal Aid attorney and the Last Honest Cop, are a couple of cuties who need a less indulgent director: …
Young marrieds get the John Hughes treatment, with the technical innovation (for him) of literal-minded fantasy scenes where his natural broadness has a built-in alibi ("So why did I feel like the world was closing in on me?" narrates the hero, as the walls of his office collapse like a …
One long chase. The fugitive, a vicious killer, abducts a female trail guide to lead him into Canada, and the guide's lover, and fellow woodsman and mountaineer, sets out to save her but is forced to drag along as a ball-and-chain an FBI "tenderfoot." Most of the action flows easily …
Tennessee Williams Meets Mary Roberts Rinehart (weather forecast: a sopping downpour), with a final chorus out of Tales from the Crypt. Bill Condon, the fledgling director, pumps in atmosphere by the bucketful, with smoggy, soft-focus imagery and languidly caressing camera movements and lots of hollow and unmeaning Southern Gothic icons. …
A couple of basketball-and-Lowenbrau yuppies come to the aid of a battered woman in a parking lot. There's something strange about the greasy-haired, single-earringed batterer ("A prophecy, my brother: you will regret this as long as you live"). But there's something strange about the victim too: she can identify the …
At a glance an underworld comedy in the general vein of Married to the Mob -- but intermittent or even more frequent admirers of Paul Morrissey, quite unlike those of Jonathan Demme on the occasion of Mob, will have no need to make apology. First off, as Morrissey edges closer …
The "shitty business" of boxing, even including cold-blooded murder. Retribution for this comes in the ring, as a Golden Gloves champion, in his first professional fight(!), steps in for his dead brother against the fifth-ranked middleweight in the world (11 wins, 2 losses!). Obviously a movie for, and by, people …
The sort of movie that image-conscious minority leaders are always clamoring for: an Upbeat Story centered around a Positive Role Model, in this case the factual story of the new math teacher (a positive role model in all but his posture) at a tough high school in East Los Angeles. …
A director (Pat O'Connor) who has shown an inclination but no great aptitude for "sensitive" psychological studies (Cal, A Month in the Country) is not apt to suddenly seem just the right man for transatlantic satire, in the choppy backwash of Evelyn Waugh, descending gradually into knockabout farce. And sure …
A light skim over deep emotional waters: athletic nostalgia, suicide, first love, first sex, the death of a parent ("Your father's been in an accident." "He's dead, isn't he?" -- and right into Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring), all slapped together into a series of flashbacks within a flashback. Time, …