Veteran cameraman Andrzej Bartkowiak, who has worked often for old sobersides Sidney Lumet (Prince of the City, The Verdict, Daniel, etc.), makes his directorial debut with this martial-arts flapdoodle. A career step down. Jet Li, Aaliyah, Delroy Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong.
David-and-Goliath court-martial: David a divorced, drinking, limping, emotionally fragile ex-Marine, ranked sixty-seventh in his law class at Georgetown, now called upon to defend his old Vietnam buddy for opening fire on a crowd of protesters outside the American embassy in Yemen; and Goliath a State Department bad guy who, by …
Tiddly little English comedy about a matronly widow who, deep in debt, gives over her greenhouse to the cultivation of marijuana. It's something of a relief to see Brenda Blethyn cranked down several notches below the monstrous caricatures of Secrets and Lies and Little Voice -- a relief to see …
Airplane-style, Naked Gun-style, spoof of slasher films, which is to say that it's as unparticular about its targets as about its aim. Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and their respective sequels are the main targets, and The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, The Usual Suspects, Amistad, …
A family man torn between his wife and his homosexual lover. Soapy drama; soupy music. Well acted by Javier Bardem (especially), Ariadna Gil, and Cecilia Roth; overacted by Jordi Mollà. Directed by Gerardo Vera.
A one-joke movie -- a seeming fun idea -- played torpidly and ponderously. The idea is that Max Schreck, the cadaverous vampire of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, was a bona fide vampire in real life and that his previous employment experience with Max Reinhardt's Berlin Staatstheater was only a cover story. …
Strictly speaking a sequel and not a remake, a perpetuation of the family name, or brand name, of the identically titled 1971 blaxploitation hit. The original John Shaft, now "Uncle" John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), puts in a couple of cameo appearances (along with his director, the leonine Gordon Parks) as …
Kung Fu for laughs. A martial-arts master, member of the Imperial Guard in the Forbidden City, travels to Carson City, Nevada, to retrieve the abducted Princess Pei Pei. (Local pronunciation: "Princess Pee Pee." Local pronunciation of the master's name, Chon Wang: "John Wayne.") Jackie Chan has a new supply of …
Qualms over human cloning give way to outright glee over car chases, explosions, and endless shootouts featuring futuristic firearms whose laser rays produce a Roman-candle effect upon impact. This effect occurs around four hundred times in the course of the action. (The rights and wrongs of cloning, to say nothing …
Faustian soul-selling at an unnamed Ivy League school, all for the privilege of admittance to a sinister Secret Society: sleeping potions, hooded red robes, icy white spotlights, dungeons and cages, keys to the inner sanctum. Silly as the dickens. With Joshua Jackson, Paul Walker, Craig T. Nelson, William Petersen, Christopher …
Small-time Woody Allen, but that's not such a bad thing. Less pretension, lower pressure. It is of course impossible, after everything that has happened in the interim, both on screen and off it, for Allen to revert to the carefree spirit of his first directing effort, Take the Money and …
Uncharming charmer, more of a pleader, about the romantic flounderings of dissimilar twins ("For some reason I was a happy-go-lucky little fuck. My brother was born with a migraine headache"), played by the real-life Martini brothers, dirty-blond Steven and dark Derick. They also co-wrote the script with director (and old …
The longest running revue in Broadway history comes to the big screen in a live theatrical performance: 39 classics from Leiber and Stoller, including "Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock," "Spanish Harlem," and oh yeah, "Fools Fall in Love."