Puerile coming-of-age comedy about four bosom buddies, with sharply contrasted and rigidly fixed personalities, who grow up to be Demi Moore (sci-fi writer), Melanie Griffith (celebrity bimbo), Rosie O'Donnell (doctor), and Rita Wilson (homemaker). Their reunion in Shelby, Ind., for the birth of the first baby of the group, frames …
A strategic village on the Ho Chi Minh Trail needs a new elephant (never mind why), and the U. S. Army promises to deliver: by plane, by foot, by boat, finally by parachute. (Funny sight, as long as you know it's not a real elephant.) The Vietnam War, however, proves …
Strenuous transplantation of Shakespeare (strenuously condensed) to the screen: restless changes of locale; a sex scene (trite shot of a dark hand enfolding a pale one on a white sheet); a chummy, almost winking, relationship between Kenneth Branagh's Iago and the close-up camera. Laurence Fishburne, with shaven, tattooed pate and …
Birth of the Black Panther Party, a comic-book primer with the predictable simplifications and distortions. Some of it -- like the anti-black alliance forged between the FBI and the Mafia, against a backdrop of a billowing American flag -- can be justified on rhetorical grounds if not literal ones, and …
Parker Posey, a Geraldine Chaplin-esque broomstick, with a baseless star-is-born narcissism, is the titular fun-seeker by night, library clerk by day, and falafel eater by lunch break -- as well as flirter with the handsome Lebanese street vendor who introduces her to the myth of Sisyphus. ("I think I'm an …
An accent movie: Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, and Alfred Molina doing different degrees of Desi Arnaz -- Tomei doing the most, doing too much ("Doan be dreeDEEcooluss!"). Mira Nair, who looked at the immigrant experience of her fellow Indians in Mississippi Masala, here looks at the immigrant experience of Cubans …
Masterpiece Theatre production earmarked for British television and then palmed off on the culturally deprived colonists as a Prestige Picture. The performers, though not particularly well-known faces (Samuel West's might be recognized as that of the pathetic Leonard Bast in Howards End), are without a doubt as technically skilled as …
Simple, direct, dreary women's film on the travails of a mail-order Japanese bride in the Hawaiian cane fields of 1918. A moment of brightening when Toshiro Mifune arrives at the plantation to narrate a silent samurai film. With Youki Kudoh, Tamlyn Tomita; directed by Kayo Hatta.
The thirty-third animated feature to come from the Disney studio is also the first one to be inspired by an authentic historical figure. The duty to historical fact, however, has had the regrettable effect of diverting the course of the narrative away from imagination (which can lead who-knows-where) and toward …
The thirty-third animated feature to come from the Disney studio is also the first one to be inspired by an authentic historical figure. The duty to historical fact, however, has had the regrettable effect of diverting the course of the narrative away from imagination (which can lead who-knows-where) and toward …
From the exiled Chilean communist poet Pablo Neruda, the temporary mailman on an illiterate Italian island learns about language, about love, about life. (Ironically enough, the actor in the part, Massimo Troisi, died immediately after the completion of shooting.) The teacher-pupil stuff — "What are metaphors?" etc. — is palatably …
Odd little science-fiction fable about an albino teenager (Sean Patrick Flanery) who has taken the evolutionary leap toward Einstein's envisionment of pure energy, pure intelligence, without the obligatory burden of a fleshly body. Or something like that. The religioso and pomposo tendencies are not out of place in cinematic science …
A public airing of dirty Catholic linen. Father Greg, a stiff-necked young priest filling an opening in squalid Liverpool, presumes to instruct his elder on their mutual congregation ("You expect less of the people because they live in a poor parish"), and presumes in addition to advise him to get …
A homicide cop, and ex-seminarian, on a tailor-made case: the corpse is an eyeless hermaphrodite tattooed with the ancient Hebraic symbol of the angel Uziel, and among his effects is a 2nd-century Bible containing a previously suppressed chapter. "Are you saying we have an angel on ice?" Exactly. Renewed warfare …